


superluminal

by wentz



Category: NCT (Band), WayV (Band)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Aliens, Alternate Universe - Star Wars Setting, Caper Fic, Enemies to Lovers, M/M, Rebel Pilot Qian Kun, Science Fiction, Sex in Space, Sexual Tension, Smuggler Suh Youngho | Johnny, Space Battles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-28
Updated: 2020-08-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:40:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 37,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26067391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wentz/pseuds/wentz
Summary: A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...A man who can only be the captain of the smuggling vessel stands at the top of the ship's ramp, cutting a roguish picture as he leans with one arm against one of the hydraulic pillars. He looks supremely dashing.Kun dislikes him on sight.
Relationships: Suh Youngho | Johnny/Qian Kun
Comments: 25
Kudos: 160
Collections: Johnkun Fic Fest Round 1 (2020)





	superluminal

**Author's Note:**

> warnings include:
> 
> \- sexual content  
> \- minor recreational drug use  
> \- minor description of blood/injury
> 
> no prior knowledge of star wars necessary to enjoy this fic ♡
> 
> written for johnkun fic fest 2020 for prompt #h023:
> 
> star wars au: straight-laced rebel alliance leader kun is forced to work with notoriously chaotic bounty hunter johnny on a recon mission. things are obviously not going as efficiently as kun is used to, but it would help a lot if johnny wasn't such a flirt
> 
> to my prompter: i had so much fun writing this and i really hope you have a lot of fun reading it. i wrote it all with us both in mind ♡
> 
> also, a big thank you to the jkff mod for their patience and how well they put together and facilitated the fest!!! i can't wait to read all the wonderful johnkuntent ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ
> 
> without further ado, my completely self-indulgent star wars fic. enjoy, and may the force be with you.

_Kriff. Kriff kriff kriffing kriffity kriff kriff_ —

“This is Cloud Leader to the _Vision_ , do you copy?” The yoke of the starfighter judders violently in Kun’s grip, threatening to slip through the worn-in leather of his flying gloves. He grits his teeth, doing his best to control the ship’s nosedive with one hand while he tries every last toggle on his dashboard. Everything either comes up dark or blinks back at him in all the wrong colors. “ _Vision,_ this is Cloud Leader, do you copy?!”

Static crackles in his helmet but nothing in any kind of discernable language. Frustrated, he rips the receiver away from his mouth. “Dammit!”

The droid in the back interrupts his open transmission with the flagship to unload a frantic stream of binary into his ear. “I know, I know! Can you at least fix the atmo brakes?” The droid responds with a _blat_. “Look, just— try, or we’re both gonna end up a shit smear on the moon surface.”

It was supposed to be a routine mission. It was _supposed_ to be Kun hopping a system over to collect a simple recon report on the Imperial presence occupying the neighboring planet that the chief of a small-fry moon offered them. Nothing big, nothing star-shattering. It should’ve been a total blue milk run.

It _should’ve_ been. And then Kun dropped out of lightspeed directly into a knot of TIEs and everything went tits up. Kun’s not a bad pilot by any means but even he has trouble managing half a squadron on his own. To make a space epic short, they totally shredded him, leaving him no choice but to retreat into the atmosphere of the nearest moon—a shitball little rock whose city lights caught Kun’s eye mid-maneuver. The TIEs had already fried his nav system before he started his tailspin through the atmosphere but as his fighter hurtles closer to the surface he recognises the landscape and groans.

“Not this pisshole, good pfaask.” He toggles his atmo brakes a few times to no effect. “Arfive, where the _hell_ are my atmo brakes, you glorified soda can?!”

The droid shrills at him, offended, but the verbal abuse must put some gas in his motivator because a second later, the atmo brakes open with a shriek of metal grinding against metal and a spray of sparks that shower past the windshield.

Kun shouts in relief, hauling back on the yoke with both hands again and bracing his boots against the bottom of the cockpit as though he could pull the nose of the plummeting starcraft up on his own physical power. The lights of the ecumenopolis are growing exponentially bigger by the millisecond. All of Kun’s instruments went dark during atmospheric entry, so he has no way of measuring for sure how close he is to the moon’s surface, but mental math is enough to tell him that there’s no avoiding impact at their current trajectory and no time to aim for a more optimal landing. He has to remind himself not to squeeze his eyes shut as the falling ( _crashing,_ Kun thinks. At this point, he can concede that what Cloud One is doing right now is _crashing_ ) starfighter screams towards the rooftops of the city-moon below.

 _Please don’t hit anybody,_ Kun prays. _Please don’t hit anybody, please don’t hit anybody, please don’t hit anybody_ —

The tenement building rises up out of nowhere. Cloud One blasts right through it.

The last thing Kun sees is the reflection of his own starfighter in the structure’s big, dark, reflective windows.

✩

Consciousness returns to him in blurry, disjointed flashes. Here, two hands under his armpits and the view of his own legs as he’s dragged out of the wreckage of his X-wing. There, the pain shooting through his head as he’s jostled and moved around. Here, sharp voices barking in alien tongues that he can’t translate through his cloudy concussion. There, cold water being tipped past his lips.

When he finally fully comes to, his first thought is neither _where am I_ nor _am I in danger_ but rather, _Dammit, Doyoung is never gonna let me hear the end of it for totalling an X-wing._ He tries to sit up and groans when a sharp pain throbs through his skull.

“Careful there, rebel,” someone says. “You got the proper shit kicked out of you.”

Kun grabs the bottom of his helmet with the intention of taking it off only for someone else to pry his hands away. “Get off,” he protests weakly.

“I wouldn’t take that helmet off if I were you,” says the voice. “You might have whiplash and if you take your helmet off without taking off your flight vest you could make it worse.”

That’s all well and good but Kun feels like a kriffing turtle lying on his back in all of his gear. He sighs. It makes his headache pound. “Can you at least help me sit up?” he demands, sticking his arms straight out and up. Gods, he hurts all kriffing over.

He halfway expects the guy to argue but instead, he grabs onto Kun’s arms above the elbows and hauls him into a sitting position. When Kun’s upright he comes face to face with a Twi’lek.

“Who are you?”

The Twi’lek snorts. “Nice to meet you, too.”

“Forgive me,” Kun says, struggling to sit up even as sparks up pain shoot up his back. “I’m a little _testy_ after getting blown out of the sky and waking up in a strange place.”

“You’re on Nar Shaddaa.” The Twi’lek helps Kun get settled semi-comfortably against the wall. “In what passes for a jail on this shitrock.”

Kun snorts. He slides his visor up to take a better look at their cell. It’s not much—even for a prison. Nothing that could pass for a bed or even a place to sit decorates the barren ferrocrete cube that passes for their cell other than a shitty chamber pot (no pun intended) in one godforsaken corner. The door looks like it would buckle under a couple of firm, well-placed kicks. Kun wonders why his Twi’lek cellmate hasn’t bailed yet.

“I didn’t even know Nar Shaddaa had a legal system,” he mutters as he carefully pats himself down, doing an inventory check on any wounds he might have sustained during the crash.

The Twi’lek watches, squatting a few feet away with his hands resting over his knees. “Technically it’s under the governance of Nal Hutta,” he says. “But it ain’t called ‘Smuggler’s Moon’ for nothing. The only law that matters here is the temperament of whatever crime lord whose territory you happen to be in.”

Kun resists the urge to groan. “And which crime lord’s territory did I run my starfighter through?”

A strange, amused smile twitches at the corners of the Twi’lek’s lips. “A Nagai called Hyuna.”

Of course it was a Nagai. That’s just Kun’s luck. He winces. The Twi’lek laughs, nodding in wry sympathy. “What are the odds this particular Nagai boss will see fit to bend the rules for a member of the Alliance to Restore the Republic?” Kun asks.

The Twi’lek raises his eyebrows. Fair enough. The Nagai are infamous for being 1) easily offended and 2) merciless. If that wasn’t enough, the Rebellion isn’t overly popular with smugglers. Hyuna might be well-inclined to let him rot in this prison interminably.

Kun sighs. “Do you know if I hurt anyone? When I crash landed?”

“No. You’ve got some dumb luck, scum.” The Twi’lek scratches the base of one of his lekku. “The building you wrecked was part of a skyslum that was totally abandoned after an outbreak. Hyuna was using the empty structures to store paraphernalia. The only thing you destroyed was a couple hundred thousand credits’ worth of spice.” Another wry smile twists the Twi’lek’s mouth. “Which, on this moon, might be worse.”

Kriffing Nar Shaddaa. Why did Kun have to choose this of all moons to crash on? He starts to fumble with the straps of his flight vest, struggling to undo them with his helmet keeping him from being able to fully see what his hands are doing.

The Twi’lek watches him for a few minutes before he offers, “You want some help with that?”

Isn’t _that_ a question. Trust the random alien he was tossed into a jail cell with or continue turtling around in his vest and helmet? Either way, Kun would be leaving himself vulnerable. On the one hand, he has no idea who this guy is or why he’s been thrown into jail. He could, ostensibly, be a murderer. If he’s on Nar Shaddaa, he likely isn’t a Rebellion sympathiser, either. On the other hand… it’s starting to get really hot inside this gods-damned vest.

His suspicion must be written all over his face because the Twi’lek rolls his eyes. “For frang’s sake,” the alien sighs. “You Rebellion types are all so paranoid. What do you think I’m gonna do, huh? Bite your throat out?” He bares his pointed teeth and clicks them together a few times.

Embarrassed, Kun lets his hands fall away from his vest, giving silent permission with a small nod. The Twi’lek waddles closer, still in a crouch, and gets to work on the fastenings of Kun’s vest.

“I’m Ten,” the Twi’lek says.

“Short name for a Twi’lek,” Kun comments. Ten gives him a sharp look, to which Kun holds his hands up in apology. He shouldn’t have expected much more from someone he just met in prison. “Commander Qian Kun. Of Dandoran.”

The Twi’lek smirks. “Hello, Commander Qian Kun of Dandoran.” The vest releases. Kun takes a deep breath. His chest expands freely with only minimal pain. No broken ribs. “What do you say we blow this place and get off this rock, rebel?”

Kun pulls his helmet off so Ten can get the full effect of his bewildered stare. “Excuse me?”

“I’m not too good at flying,” Ten explains. While Kun wriggles out of his vest, Ten stands and strolls over to the cell door. “And something tells me you’re not too good at navigating the seedy underbelly of a lawless urban moonscape.” He prods with the toe of his boot at a spot at the base of the door where the metal has bent. “I think that makes us unlikely bedfellows, don’t you?”

“Let me get this straight.” Kun hauls himself to his feet, largely relying on the wall to steady himself as his head pounds. “You want to _jailbreak_ with _me?_ ”

Ten casts a glance over his shoulder, his tattooed eyebrows moving upwards in a coy arch. The long, twin lekku that hang down his back twitch at the ends, flicking at Kun almost playfully. “You got a better plan?”

Well… no. Kun doesn’t have a better plan.

✩

Johnny is in—for lack of a better word—deep bantha shit.

Here’s the thing about the Hutts: they’re older than dirt and twice as patient. There’s a reason so many Hutts become crime lords. They just straight up _outlive_ all the competition. If they can’t beat out a competitor, they just have to wait for the poor bastard to kick it and then slither in to absorb the assets.

(Well, really, if you want to get technical, there are a _lot_ of reasons that Hutts become crime lords, including that their culture’s sense of morality and ethics is so incomparable to most human or humanoid standards as to seem non-existent. An old saying on Corellia used to go, “Honor among Hutts is a knife in the back.” The Basic word for _criminal_ actually has no accurate translation in Huttese because what most species consider _criminal_ , the Hutts see as good business sense. This general attitude is not made any more benevolent by the fact that Hutts see themselves as a god species. It’s hard to convince someone who believes their interests and well-being takes precedence over all other life in the universe to cut you some slack on your late fees.)

Grakkus the Hutt is no different. He’s old, and wily, and _mean_. Johnny thinks Grakkus is mean mostly because the damned slug seems to be able to read Johnny’s mind, which isn’t at all fair. A smuggler’s sabacc face is a personal point of pride. Grakkus has no respect for that at all. The Hutt seems to actually get a sick kind of enjoyment out of slam dunking on him.

The big worm really rolled the red carpet out for them this time. Johnny and Chenle had scarcely approached the back of Grakkus’s palace (the “service entrance,” so to speak, for unesteemed guests like Johnny and the various and sundry cast of smugglers and bounty hunters with whom Grakkus does business) before a troop of guards intercepted them, armed to the teeth.

Now the guards frogmarch Johnny into Grakkus’s “leisure chamber,” leaving Chenle to wait outside amid a cluster of huge guards. Despite Johnny’s better judgement—and on account of who he is as a person—he elects to make a smartass remark as he’s half-pushed down the length of the room.

He just can’t resist a dramatic entrance.

“Awe, cute,” Johnny coos, allowing one of the guards to wrench his arms behind his back. “So sweet of you to send me a welcoming party, ol’ Grakkie.”

The Hutt in question sits atop a litter that hovers just above an enormous dais. He looks like the cheap recreation of an image painted on a temple wall: all shocking purples and reds spilling over the sides in silk and velvet. Smoke from his gilded hookah pipe hangs around his great, green head in violet rings that radiate outwards in concentric circles, losing their definition as they dissipate into the room’s atmosphere. The smell of marcan herb pervades the room so thickly that Johnny swears he can almost _feel_ it going into his lungs.

Grakkus grumbles. He always speaks in deep, throaty Huttese, even though Johnny _knows_ the Hutt is fluent in Basic. Haughty bastard.

“You are brave to be so flippant when you have yet to bring me the antiquities I am owed.” He takes a long drag off of his pipe, then gestures with the end of it. The guards holding Johnny’s arms release him and step back a few paces. Grakkus’s next words billow out of his great mouth in clouds of purple. “I paid you to fetch me a Jedi relic. Where is it?”

Truthfully, the “Jedi relic” that Johnny risked his life and his ship for in about six different ways (fire, water, giant unidentified space beast(s), freakish atmospheric storms, an Imperial ambush, an _Alliance_ ambush, and a particularly undiplomatic visit from one of Johnny’s… _prior romantic acquaintances_ ) turned out to be a shitty-looking old manuscript too ancient and deteriorated to even be legible. It’s hardly Johnny’s fault that the Jedi were stupid enough to use organic materials to record their freaky wizard magic spells.

(Although, really, he can’t say he’s particularly surprised because the Jedi were also stupid enough to allow the most evil Sith lord of all time to infiltrate their ranks and destroy their digital record-keeping system from the inside out, too.)

(In Johnny’s opinion, the Jedi were really, really stupid.)

Regardless of where the fault originated (the Jedi, it’s the Jedi’s fault), the ship’s climate control system malfunctioned while they were under enemy fire—Johnny can’t remember now whether it was the Imperials, the Alliance, or Jeonghan, but it hardly matters now—and the manuscript completely fell apart. Grakkus might’ve still accepted it—most of his “antiques” are just glorified hunks of Jedi trash, anyways—but then Yukhei unwittingly used the flakes of parchment to line the ship Loth-cat’s litter box.

Grakkus would probably be less than amused to hear that the ancient Jedi manuscript that he valued at over two hundred thousand credits wound up covered in Leon the Loth-cat’s shit. So, instead of regaling the notorious crime lord with a penchant for throwing double crossers into gladiatorial combat with the _real_ story of what happened to his precious antique, Johnny makes something up.

“Listen, Grakkus,” he says, stalling for time. “About the relic—it’s a bust. Must’ve been a bad lead. We followed the coordinates but the whole planet was a wasteland, just some little tribes of pseudo-sentients that tried to steal our droid.” Johnny shrugs. “I’ll let you off the hook for the other half of the payment since I couldn’t finish the job.”

The slug gurgles deep in his chest. Johnny can only assume it’s supposed to be a laugh. “You are a bad liar, Suh,” Grakkus chuckles in his deep, throaty Huttese. “I believe you _swore on your mother’s grave_ , did you not?”

Johnny coughs under his breath. “Yes, well… my mother is actually in very good health—”

“She would not be, perhaps, if she knew how very close her dear son is to becoming nexu fodder in my arena.” Grakkus’s tail slaps against the cushions. “My generosity is running thin, boy. Deliver the relic to me or return my twenty thousand credits.”

That’s another annoying thing about Hutts. They don’t seem to comprehend the fact that rolling in ridiculous piles of wealth is not the norm. _Give me twenty thousand credits_ , like Johnny just has twenty thousand credits _lying around_. All of that cash had been spent on desperately-needed fuel and parts before it could even go cold in Johnny’s pocket.

Johnny suppresses an irritated sigh and says, “Grakkus, buddy, I already invested that twenty thousand, you know? My ship—”

The guards suddenly flank Johnny on both sides, crowding in close and grabbing his arms. From atop his dais, Grakkus gives a dismissive wave of his pipe and says, “Then you will repay your debt in my arena.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, you didn’t let me finish!” Johnny spreads his hands as best he can where they’re restrained behind his back. “I _invested_ your twenty thousand and I expect to see a _return_ on that investment very, very soon, but, you know, I can’t make good on that money if I’m locked up in your very fancy stadium, can I?”

Grakkus considers him for a moment, stroking one of his many chins with a greasy paw. Whatever he sees in Johnny’s face (Johnny’s vanity would like to say it’s his winning smile but the reality is probably something more like desperation; any criminal worth his snuff knows that desperation is highly lucrative) makes him hum. “Very well. I will grant you a short extension. With _interest_ , Suh.” The guards release Johnny again, only to point their blasters at his back. “I will grant you a week’s time. Thirty thousand credits.”

Johnny nods. “Of course, of course.” He’s so royally screwed. “You’ve got my word.”

The slug harrumphs. “I have little use for the words of pirates. I will believe your word when you return with my thirty thousand.”

 _Not a pirate_ , Johnny wants to say. He figures it’s a bad time to risk the Hutt’s temper. “Thanks, Grakkus, you won’t regret this,” he says, already backing towards the door. The sooner he gets the hell out of Dodge, the less time Grakkus has to change his mind. He’s halfway to the huge doors when Grakkus speaks.

“And, Suh?”

Johnny turns around, forcing his best customer service smile back onto his face.

The Hutt’s eyes glimmer in the low light, dull gold like galactic credits. “I can have bounty hunters posted in every spaceport from here to Rakata Prime looking for you. To run away would be deadly.”

Dread washes over Johnny. Grakkus isn’t exaggerating. Hutts have long memories to match their long lifespans. The debt he owes is less about the credits—of which Grakkus has plenty—and more about the gangster’s pride. If word got out that he’d been sheisted by one of his hired hands, the resulting gossip would not shine favorably on the old Hutt. Johnny nods once, and then books it to the exit before Grakkus can threaten him any more. The doors close behind him with a boom.

On the other side, Chenle pulls away from the guards minding him to hover at Johnny’s side. “Well?” he asks. “What’d he say?” His eyes rove Johnny’s face, hunting for any clue as to how the meeting with the big gangster went.

Johnny puts on a grin, hooking one arm around Chenle’s neck. Best to keep up appearances until they can have some privacy to regroup. “Plan B,” he says, pulling Chenle with him. The guards flank them as they go, walking them out of the palace.

Chenle twists in his grip to look up at Johnny’s face. “Plan B?”

He nods grimly. “Plan B.”

The guards follow them all the way out of the palace and then stand in an intimidating line across the doorway to watch them get into their speeder. It’s overkill to the point of being funny. Johnny isn’t sure how Chenle manages to hold in his laughter.

Finally, their speeder pulls away from the great, looming shadow of the palace. As they pass the walls of Grakkus’s colosseum, the Hutt’s final warning crawls the length of Johnny’s spine with cold fingers. _Running would be deadly_.

Running is all Johnny knows how to do.

✩

Blood thrums in Kun’s ears, interrupting the intermittent blare of the prison klaxon. The red lights from the escape alarms flash from the prison walls behind them, lighting up the dark twists and turns of the narrow alleyway in short bursts of crimson. Angry voices and the trampling of heavy boots echo down the barrel of the alley; prison guards in close pursuit, and getting closer.

“Where,” Kun wheezes in between breaths, “are we going?”

In lieu of an answer, Ten suddenly cuts to one side, darting down an even narrower offshoot. If Kun didn’t know any better, he’d think the Twi’lek was trying to lose him in the unfamiliar ratways of Nar Shaddaa’s undercity.

He won’t be outmaneuvered that easily. Digging his heels into the pavement, Kun manages to arrest his forward momentum enough to throw himself sideways into the tiny lane. He immediately collides with his new partner in crime.

Ten clamps a hand around Kun’s mouth and pulls him roughly up against the wall, pressing them both as close to the cold, damp wall as he can. They wait, holding their breath, and watch the open mouth of the lane for movement. A few tense heartbeats pass as they listen to the prison guards come closer, still hot on their previous trail, and then—

The guards pass in a blur of grey uniforms, still shouting threats and disjointed orders. One guard pauses near the opening of the lane and looks over his shoulder only to wave at the guards bringing up the rear, bellow, “They went this way, down here!” and then continue running in the wrong direction.

Kun’s heart pounds a few more times, counting down the seconds as the last wave of guards straggle past their hiding spot. Finally, Ten lets go of him and they both let go of the breath they’d been holding—Ten, voluntarily and Kun, less so.

“Gods,” Ten mutters. “These guys act like we’re high profile fugitives.”

“Aren’t we?” asks Kun. “We did technically just break out of jail. Isn’t that a felony?”

The Twi’lek tosses one of his lekku over his shoulder and edges past Kun to walk up the lane. “It’s not a felony to break out of an illegal prison. Anyways, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, rebel, but the place ain’t called ‘Smuggler’s Moon’ for nothing. Folks ‘round here don’t really care that much about legality.”

Fair enough. “But where are we going?” Kun asks. “You have a ship?” A conspicuous silence follows his question. “ _Ten_.” He bites the word out like a curse. “You have a ship, _right_?”

“What is a _ship_ , really, when you think about it—”

Kun jogs a little bit to catch up, walking right on Ten’s heels as they climb the incline of the lane. “Engine, cockpit, wings. Spaceworthy, capable of getting us _off of this rock_.” He grabs Ten’s arm but the Twi’lek keeps walking, eyes front. “You said you had a ship.”

“I said no such thing,” Ten insists, hands going up to absolve himself of responsibility.

“You _heavily implied_ it.”

“I think you’ll find heavy implications don’t hold up in a court of law.” Ten brushes Kun’s hand off his arm. “Relax, Qian. I’ll get us a ship. We’re just making a quick detour to pick up some essentials and then we’ll skip off to the shipyards and find you a pretty little cherry red star cruiser.”

After quashing down a hint of bitterness that he didn’t think of it first, Kun admits that stopping for supplies before going off-moon is a wise move. Still, he refuses to say it out loud. Even just a few hours with Ten has been enough for Kun to realise that the Twi’lek is nigh on insufferable when smug.

Instead, he asks, “How far off the beaten path is this detour gonna take us?”

“Not far.” Ten glances over his shoulder, holding up a thumbs-up. “No stress, rebel, I’ve got more friends in this city than enemies.” He pauses. “Well, depending on your definition of friends, I guess. Maybe ‘positive acquaintances’ would be a better operating term.”

“Positive acquaintances,” Kun says, lacing the words with as much sarcasm as two words can carry. “Sure.”

After all, he really doesn’t have much choice. Without the Twi’lek leading him, Kun would be lost in this den of thieves in a matter of seconds. He trusts his own capabilities but with a crime lord _and_ what passes for law enforcement both on his tail, he’d probably wind up as bantha fodder before he even figured out which way is up.

Ten leads them through the ratways, taking so many turns and shortcuts that Kun quickly loses any hope of being able to retrace their steps. If Kun cranes his head back, he can see the underbellies of speeders, skiffs, and other grav-cars competing for airspace in the lanes between the structures that tower hundreds of stories above them.

The tenants of Nar Shaddaa constructed the urban moonscape in layers; when the first settlers could no longer build outwards, they built up, and the generations of thieves and criminals who have come since then have followed suit in perpetuity. From down here, at the bottom of the undercity, one cannot see the topmost tier of the ecumenopolis through the pollution. People with more tact refer to Nar Shaddaa as “Little Coruscant” but Kun knows the filth, pollution, and corruption of Nar Shaddaa pervades every layer of its cityscape in a manner very much unlike Coruscant. Kun can handle himself in Coruscant’s underworld. He wonders how much seedier and more dangerous it could be in the underbelly of a smuggler’s moon—nevertheless, as an Alliance pilot on a moon of Imperial sympathisers.

Mostly, he sees a lot of boarded-up storefronts and suspicious eyes glinting at him from the spaces between buildings. Ten flounces past it all without sparing it a second glance, or even a first glance, for that matter. Kun wonders if he notices any of it at all. Perhaps the Twi’lek has spent so long in the company of bandits that shady characters lurking in the shadows no longer ping his mental warning bells.

No sooner has Kun made up his mind to start pestering Ten for answers again than the alien takes one last right turn down a lane and stops in front of a storefront. Kun screws up his nose as he takes in the derelict facade. Boards cover all of the windows and the lights that once illuminated the sign have all been smashed. The sign itself is rusty and dusty to the point of illegibility.

“This is it?” he asks.

Ten snorts. “Not exactly what you pictured?” He raps on the door with the backs of his knuckles and then mashes the buzzer. “The scrap rats who run this place are friends of mine. My partner’s been keeping a low profile here while I’ve been in the clink.”

 _Partner_. Kun eyes Ten from his peripherals. _So I have to deal with_ two _runaway bandits instead of one?_

Above the buzzer, a little robotic eye blinks awake, wriggling on its articulating arm as it looks Ten up and down. It hesitates for a moment after giving Kun a similar rundown, and then swivels back over to look at Ten as if to say, _Who’s the mook-milker?_ It’s surprisingly expressive for a surveillance cam.

His Twi’lek companion jerks his head towards Kun. “He’s with me.”

The cam gives Kun another dubious look before powering down again. A tick later, the door clunks and whirs as someone inside buzzes them in. Ten throws his shoulder against the metal door. It resists, scraping against the warped floor, and then swings inward.

“Just be cool, rebel,” Ten says as they cross the threshold. “Try not to say anything dorky or… boy scout-y.”

Kun scoffs. “I’m cool,” he mutters under his breath.

Shelving units overladen with what can only be classified by the untrained eye as _junk_ fill the interior of the little scrap shop, arranged in parallels and perpendiculars in a maze of rusted metal. It’s dark, lit only by the occasional shop lamp clamped to the corners of the shelves and whatever light manages to eke in through the ventilation grates on the exterior walls. Every step they take stirs up dust motes that dance in the haze. Through the gaps between shelves, Kun catches a glimpse of sparks flying as someone at the other end of the shop works with a plasma welder.

“Oi!” Ten starts to weave in between the shelves, clearly already familiar with the layout of the shop. Kun half-trots to keep up. “Honey, I’m home!”

The high-pitched squeal of the welder pauses. “Crink off,” responds a voice from the depths of the shop.

They round a final stack of shelves and finally reach what must be the center of business for this bizarre little scrap shop. The countertop spilling over with parts to a gadget in some state of construction or deconstruction, Kun’s not sure; either way, it’s a mess. A waifish humanoid sits behind it, holding his welder in one hand and what looks like an accordioning arm in the other. He shoves his welding goggles to the top of his head. They scrunch up his choppy hair and reveal the pointed tips of his ears. He must be Sephi, then, or one of the countless subspecies related to the Sephi.

Without sparing a greeting for the guy hunched on the stool behind the counter, Ten demands, “Where is he?”

The guy gestures over his shoulder towards the beaded curtain that covers a doorway leading to another part of the shop. “In the back. Wouldn’t stop whining while you were gone so I put ‘im to sleep,” he says, watching with mild disinterest as Ten immediately speedwalks around the counter and into the adjacent room. The Sephi’s eyes drift back over to Kun. “Who’re you?” he asks.

“Kun,” he answers.

The Sephi nods and looks Kun up and down. His eyes are big and doelike; much more disarming than the quirky little surveillance cam outside. “Winwin.”

Now Kun nods. Winwin sits, leaning on his knees. He doesn’t seem particularly inclined to chat but he also doesn’t go back to his work. Kun shifts in place under the Sephi’s gaze. He wishes he’d paid more attention in his social studies classes because now he can’t remember whether or not Sephi are one of the races that can read minds. The more he strategically tries to not think about all of his most deeply embarrassing secrets, the more those memories parade around his head in a mortifying procession.

“Ten?” he calls. Nervous sweat prickles under both of his armpits. “You and your pal ready to go yet, or…?”

In an act of the benevolent Force, Ten chooses that moment to reappear through the beaded curtain, this time with a bulky black and white astromech droid in his arms—judging by the shape of the body, it’s probably an Lμ-15 unit. “Will you be patient? Give him a minute, he needs to reboot.” The Twi’lek strokes the droid’s head casing and says in a truly sickening baby voice, “Isn’t that right, my perfect little boy, you had a long day, so worried about me.” The droid, still firing up, bloops out a few groggy lines of binary in agreement.

Winwin makes a face at the display. “I’ve never seen someone be this codependent with their droid.”

“He’s more than a droid _,_ ” Ten coos, snuggling his face close to the Lμ-15 unit. The droid chirrups. It almost sounds like a purr.

Kun blinks. “You _gendered_ your _droid_?”

Ten gasps, turning his body slightly away from Kun as though to shield Louis from his words. “He’s my _baby!_ I can’t call him ‘it’.”

From his stool behind the counter, Winwin chimes in with his two cents. “‘It’ is a perfectly valid pronoun.”

“Well, _he_ doesn’t have to be gendered, either.” Ten squeezes the droid tighter. “And Louis is very happy with being a ‘he’, aren’t you, Louis?”

The droid— _Louis_ —trills a small symphony of binary that basically translates to the droid equivalent of _whatever makes you happy makes me happy!_

Kun doesn’t have time to get into gender politics today. “As much as I’d love to really get elbow deep in the nitty gritty of gender assignment in droid ethics—” He raises his eyebrows. “I do believe there’s currently a large number of _prison guards_ currently combing the city for us, so…” He gestures towards the door.

Winwin finally looks up from his tinkering. “You broke out of jail?”

Ten shrugs from where he kneels on the shop floor, getting Louis settled and doing a quick assessment of the droid. “Not a big deal, just popped one of the cells in the Nagai District.”

The Sephi’s eyebrows raise, reaching towards the goggles on the crown of his forehead. “The Nagai District, huh? You messed with Hyuna?”

“I didn’t mess with Hyuna so much as, Hyuna told me to jump and instead of saying ‘how high’ I said ‘what’s the bare minimum I can do to get by?’” Louis sings a little tune, announcing that its systems are fully online, and Ten straightens. He pats away the dust on the knees of his pants and continues, “Hey, Winko, you still got that little two-seater or did you take it apart in a manic frenzy already?”

Winwin rolls his eyes. “I told you like a million times, that old Jumpmaster was never mine, I was restoring it for a client. It’s gone now, anyways. Finally got the parts to mod the hyperdrive a few months back.” He stops, lowering the parts he’s begun to fiddle with again, and fixes Ten with a wary eye. “Why, what do you need a scouting ship for?”

“Honeymoon,” Ten replies, dry as a bone. “Me and the mister are celebrating our jailhouse nuptials.”

Scowling, Winwin tosses his tool back onto the pile on top of his counter and boosts himself off the seat. “Har, har, whatever. Don’t tell me if you want, Mr Secretive, it won’t change the fact that I ain’t got spare vessels pouring out my asshole.” The Sephi comes around the counter to pick through the indeterminate pile of junk on the shelf behind Kun. His eyes cut to the side, turning suddenly sharp as he looks askance at Ten. “If you really needed a ship, you should’ve just gone straight to the source.”

For the first time since Kun met him, Ten looks awkward. The Twi’lek clears his throat, looking down to fiddle with his clothes. “Yes, well… I just thought I’d ask you first. Was on the way, you know, and…” He trails off, eyes doing loop-the-loops around the room as he avoids Winwin’s gaze. “Me and, uh, you know, we had… A little bit of a… falling out, you might say.”

Winwin puts his hands on his hips. “What did you do?”

“I don’t appreciate your tone!” Ten squeaks. The high pitch of his voice waves the red flag of guilt. “Why do you guys always assume it was _me,_ maybe _he_ — You know, I’m not the only one with flaws here.”

“Big talk coming from a two bit thief,” Winwin retorts. He produces a little fiddly bit from the avalanche of parts on the shelf, inspects it quickly, and then carries it back over to his desk. He takes a fusing pen out from behind his ear and starts to fuse this new piece to the part he was working on earlier. “I still remember when you stole the haul from Kessel right out from under Nakamoto’s nose, and I’m sure none of the others have forgotten, either.”

Ten gasps, offended. “We’re _all_ two-bit thieves,” he insists. “And besides, the Kessel thing was a big misunderstanding—”

“You know what?” Winwin throws his hands up. “On second thought, I don’t actually want to know. Whatever you did is between you and him.” He pulls his welding goggles back over his eyes, hunching over his work again before adding, “But if you want any chance at getting off-moon before Hyuna’s goons get you, I suggest you make amends swift-like. He’s only on-moon for a day or so to wrap up a job.”

Kun swivels his head back around to fix Ten with a look. “Well?” he demands.

The Twi’lek sighs, rubs at the base of his lekku with his thumb and forefinger, and then crosses his arms. After a moment of contemplation, he purses his lips. “Fine.”

“It’s dangerous to go alone,” sing-songs Winwin without raising his head. “There are some blasters in belts on the shelf. Consider them party favors.”

Ten finds the holster belts in question. “Cheers, Win.” He passes one to Kun as he brushes past, Louis trundling along right at his heels. “If we get going now, we should catch him at the docks.”

But as he walks by, Kun hears him curse under his breath. “Gods help me,” he mutters. “I’m franged.”

 _Well_ , Kun thinks with a sigh, falling back into step behind the Twi’lek once more. _That bodes well._

Outside, Ten links his fingers behind his neck and takes a deep breath, staring up through the climbing stories of the city. After a moment, he says, “Right. To the shipyards. Stay close, boy scout.”

Without further ado, he leads them down another alleyway at the same fast clip as before. Kun stifles another sigh and jogs a few steps to catch up.

“Hey.” Kun taps Ten on the shoulder to get his attention. “Why haven’t you ditched me yet?”

“I told you. I need a pilot.”

“Bantha shit.” Ten glances at Kun over his shoulder at his sharp tone. His feet stutter to a stop. Kun pulls on his elbow to turn the Twi’lek around to face him. “If you’re willing to beg for a ride from whoever it is you guys were talking about in there, you definitely don’t need an Alliance officer weighing you down. I’m a liability on this moon, I know that. So why are you keeping me around?”

Ten narrows his eyes a fraction, assessing. Finally, he replies, “You’re an Alliance officer.”

Kun blinks. “Yes…?”

“I got put in jail for a reason,” the Twi’lek continues. “I’m tired of smuggling and stealing. I’m tired of doing jobs that pay piss change for gangsters who are richer than God. But putting in your two weeks’ notice isn’t a _thing_ for guys like me, you know? There’s always a debt that needs to be paid or a favor someone wants to cash in.” He sighs, scratching at his collar. “Some smugglers have started flying for the Rebellion recently. Sure, it puts you under the heat of the Empire, but…”

“Saving an Alliance officer would put you in the Rebellion’s good graces,” realises Kun. “If they let you join the ranks—”

Ten has the decency to look sheepish. “That’s a roof over my head with a built-in security detail. These gangster types may be Imperial sympathisers because of the cash but they’d never go out of their way to get involved with the war when the Rebels are doing such a good job at keeping Imperial attention away from their… _less-than-legal_ business ventures.”

It’s a thief’s motive for generosity but Kun can’t deny that their interests align neatly. He searches the alien’s face for a few seconds with his most serious expression, looking for any sign of artifice.

He finds only a thin, wavering thread of desperation.

“Okay.” Kun releases his hold on the Twi’lek’s arm. “To the shipyards, then. But first, we’ll need some disguises.”

✩

As expected, the docks of the Smuggler’s Moon are a world of their own.

Due to the lax (read: nonexistent) regulations on the Hutt moon, Nar Shaddaa hosts more trade and commerce than many of the larger spaceports across the galaxy. Kun’s eyebrows raise at the sight of slick, official finance and luxury vessels anchored right alongside rusted-out freighters whose serial numbers have long since been scraped off for the sake of anonymity.

The floating walkways teem with traffic but Ten navigates the crowd like a pro—as to be expected from a thief on his home turf. Aliens and humans alike line the path, advertising wares, trying to sell their services, or just glaring at anyone who comes too close to their ship—and whatever they have stowed away in the cargo holds. Kun has lost count of all the different types of illegal contraband being hawked out of the cargo holds.

The cops that chased Ten and Kun through the ratways are nowhere to be seen (which is fortunate, because their “disguises” are little more than heavy rain cloaks with hoods) and no one gives the illicit goods a second glance, unless it’s to reach for their purse.

Kun keeps his elbows close to his sides, acutely aware that shady characters are in surplus here. It’s just as well, he supposes, that any valuables he had with him either burned up in the wreckage of his X-wing or left behind when he shed his flight suit back at the prison (he’d mourned leaving behind such expensive equipment when the Rebellion was in such short supply but the bright Alliance orange would’ve been a dead giveaway on a moon full of Imperial sympathisers). He sticks so close to Ten’s six that he keeps almost tripping over Louis; the droid weaves back and forth underfoot and it’s nigh on a miracle it hasn’t caught the business end of a passerby’s boot by now.

“Are you sure this friend of yours is still here?” gripes Kun on what feels like the thirtieth incidence of a stranger swearing at him in an alien dialect for accidentally bumping into them. “This isn’t a wild bantha chase?”

“No, he’s here.” One blue finger raises above the heads of the crowd, pointing forwards at a VCX-100 anchored a few ships away. “That’s them.”

Kun pauses, raising up on his toes to get a better look at the ship.

All in all, it paints a shabby picture. Scorch marks score the hull and the finish has been completely stripped away by excess wear and tear, except for the three-meter-wide rectangle where the ship’s serial number has been shaved off to reveal the shiny metal underneath. Someone has tried to fancy up the factory standard by painting over the accents in yellow but the color has faded to an unfortunate, greasy mustard. Splashed across the side in blocky letters reads, _ONE AND ONLY_.

Kun snorts. _One and Only_ , indeed.

As they draw closer, a young human comes into view. He can’t be any older than eighteen. The boy sits atop a pallet of canisters stacked by the bottom of the ramp, dangling a string with some brightly colored feathers on the end for a tawny Loth-cat. They draw within hearing range and Ten calls, “Chenle!”

The boy looks up and a smirk that can only be described as _mischievous_ quirks up the side of his mouth. “Oh, man,” he laughs. Below his feet, the Loth-cat finally captures the feathers and rolls onto his back to worry it with all four paws. “You’re so ballsy.”

“Shut up.” Ten socks him in the arm. Louis and Leon start to circle one another warily. “Where is he?”

Chenle shrugs. He swipes at his nose, leaving behind a streak of engine grease. “We just got back from the Hutt’s palace. He’s inside…” He does finger quotes. “‘Regrouping.’”

Ten frowns. “You guys are working for Grakkus?”

The kid laughs once. “Isn’t everybody?” He looks over Ten’s shoulder at Kun. “Hi.”

“Ignore him,” Ten butts in before Kun can respond. “He’s a client.”

“I am _not_ —” Kun tries to protest. Ten shuts him up with a hand.

“He’s a _client_.” He points up into the belly of the ship. “He’s in here? I’ll just be—”

Ten scarcely puts a boot on the ramp before Chenle puts out a hand to bar his path. “Not so fast.” His grin stays as bright as ever. “I’m pretty sure last time I saw you my captain said something along the lines of, ‘if that no-good, lying Twi’lek son of a slorth ever has the gall to set foot on my ship again I’ll tie his lekku in a bow and fly him from the comm antenna.’”

“Oh, please,” scoffs Ten. “He’s so dramatic. Besides, time heals all wounds.”

Chenle laughs. He seems to be enjoying himself immensely. “Thinking maybe this one might need a little more time.”

Kun peers around Ten’s shoulder, curious. “What in stars’ name did you do to this guy, Ten?”

“What _didn’t_ he do?”

Both Ten and Kun whip around at the voice that comes from the top of the ramp. A man who can only be the freighter’s captain stands at its peak, cutting a roguish picture as he leans with one arm against one of the hydraulic pillars. He wears a black leather jacket that, much like his ship, has seen better days and matching pilot’s chaps, unbuttoned and rolled up so the cuffs touch the tops of his boots. A perfect curl of immaculately mussed brown hair hangs over his forehead. Everything Kun has heard about the man made him expect his expression to be angry, maybe even livid, but the smuggler’s smile curls at the edges, strangely feline. He looks supremely dashing.

Kun dislikes him on sight.

“There you are!” Ten’s voice pitches high, artificially sweet. “Good to see you, oh, it’s been so long!”

The captain chuckles, low and slow. “Spare me the theatrics.” He strolls down the ramp and tousles Chenle’s hair. “Yukhei needs some help in the engine room,” he says.

Chenle hops off the stack of canisters, taking it as the dismissal that it is, and trudges up the ramp with the Loth-cat close behind. As he nears the top, he hollers into the belly of the ship in Huttese, “Hey Xuxi, guess who showed up!” and then lets loose a high-pitched cackle that echoes after him as he disappears inside.

The smuggler captain leans against the canisters in his place and crosses his arms. Kun knows absolutely nothing about the guy but the smug-as-shit look on the pirate’s face is enough to make Kun’s sympathies favor Ten.

“I’m on a bit of a tight timetable here, Tennie, so let’s cut the bantha shit and get right to it.” He tilts his chin back. “What do you want and why on the Goddess’ green planet should I give it to you after the way you ripped me off back on Tatooine?” The captain lifts one arm, shaking back his sleeve to look at his watch. “I’ll give you sixty seconds.”

The Twi’lek blinks at him in disbelief. “You’re kidding.”

“Fifty-six, fifty-five, you might want to get started. Fifty-one, fifty.”

The tips of Ten’s lekku twitch in irritation. “Look, Tatooine was a big misunderstanding. You know I’d never leave you high and dry when it really mattered. I needed that score to get out of some hot water with the Black Sun and you were just gonna fritter it away on Corellian whiskey and shiny new toys for your spaceship.”

One of the smuggler’s eyebrows raises into an arrogant arch. “You never should’ve fallen in with the Black Sun in the first place. Those guys are death stick dealers and cultists.” Kun thinks that’s pretty rich coming from a man whose primary vocation is smuggling for Hutt crime lords.

“What do you want me to say?” Ten crosses his arms defensively, mirroring the smuggler’s stance. “I did what I did, and I can’t undo it now. You guys seem to have gotten on just fine without it, and it was of _great_ use to me in saving my skin.” He sighs. “So? Will you do me a solid? For old times’?”

The captain whistles and clicks his tongue doubtfully. “I dunno… I’ve got a tight turnaround for this next job and my itinerary is _really_ booked… Don’t know if I can afford to make a detour for anything less than a heartfelt, desperate plea…”

Ten curls his lip. “What, you want me to _beg_?”

Kun snorts, rolling his eyes and shouldering past Ten to draw even with him. “He’s kriffing toying with you.” He gets right up in the smuggler’s face, bristling. Nothing pisses Kun off quite like self-obsessed bullies. “I can promise you ten thousand credits in compensation once we reach our destination. That’s a good deal. Take it or we walk. There are a dozen other ships we could bum a ride on whose captains wouldn’t give us any trouble.” He sniffs. “And _they_ certainly wouldn’t give us fleas.”

The scoundrel has the audacity to laugh. “I think you’ll find not many folks ‘round these parts will be too eager to have a Rebel soldier aboard their ship. Forty thousand credits, half now and half upon arrival.”

Kun’s eyes widen. “How did you know—”

Behind him, Ten sighs. “I told you to stay quiet, boy scout.”

Gods, what Kun wouldn’t do to smack the grin off this jackass’s face. Ignoring Ten, Kun spits, “Forty thousand credits, my ass. You think I was born yesterday? Do you just get off on lording this junk heap over our heads?”

The captain smirks, chin tipped down so he and Kun are nearly nose-to-nose. “Yeah, I do. What gets you off, sweetheart?”

Fed up, Kun pulls his blaster out of the holster and points it at the smuggler from underneath his cloak. The muzzle protrudes from within the garment just enough to catch the smuggler’s attention. He raises his eyebrows, hands up in an innocent gesture. “Whoa, there, buddy,” he says. “No need to get violent.”

“Look, pirate, I don’t care who you think you are or what you think about me or how _busy_ your schedule is,” Kun snarls. “You _will_ let us onto that death trap you call a ship, and you _will_ give us safe passage back to my flagship, or so help me I will paint the hull of your freighter red with your no-good thieving guts.”

The smuggler laughs again, exchanging a brief glance with Ten over Kun’s head. “Holy shit,” he says. “You’re kriffing crazy, dude.” An odd smile spreads across his face. It makes Kun even more irritated. “I’m Johnny. Johnny Suh.”

“I’m tired,” Kun snaps. “And I’m not in the mood to play around anymore.” He keeps his blaster trained on Johnny’s balls. “Twenty thousand credits. And _no_ advance.” He doesn’t have his account card on him to do any kind of transaction, anyways, and only a laserbrain would carry cash on a mission.

The smuggler shakes his head. “Thirty thousand with a ten thousand advance. You’re in a hurry, I respect that. But I’ve got deadlines to meet, too. I got a crew to take care of. Gotta be economical, here.”

“I’ve got a _galaxy_ to take care of.”

Johnny giggles, actually _giggles_ , and looks to Ten. “Gods, how the hell did you end up with a firebrand like this? Bet he even gives _you_ a run for your money.” He regards Kun for a moment, still smiling faintly, and finally says, “Alright, hero. Thirty thousand, no advance, no delay. I’ll have you tucked away in your little Rebellion bunk bed in time for curfew. Any less and I really can’t make a deal.”

Thirty thousand. Gods help him, Doyoung will have his hide. First he totals an X-wing and an R-5 unit, then he loses his flight gear, _and_ he’s gonna have to ask to dig thirty thousand deep into the Alliance coffers for a glorified interplanetary cab ride.

“Fine.” He sheathes his blaster and juts one hand out.

Johnny’s eyebrows raise in amusement. “I don’t typically make deals with men without knowing their names.”

Through gritted teeth, Kun mutters, “Qian Kun.”

The smuggler grins wider. “Well, then, Qian Kun,” he says, taking Kun’s hand and shaking it. He swoops into a deep bow, sweeping his arm towards the ship’s ramp. “Welcome aboard the _One and Only_.”

Kun nods sharply and turns to board the freighter. Johnny’s gaze weighs heavy on his back as he goes. He knows that technically he won this battle but for some reason he can’t help but feel like he lost as the smuggler’s low chuckle follows him up the ramp.

The _One and Only_ ’s interior matches its exterior in exactly the way Kun expected a pirate vessel to look. Dings and scratches cover every surface and the panels have been wrenched away in places to expose the ship’s internals, which is a patchwork of jerry rigging and mismatched parts cannibalised from other ships. As he climbs the ramps up to the crew deck, he hears loud music and clanging from deep in the belly of the ship. A loud voice wails along to the song, cracking on the high notes.

The second deck doesn’t look much better. It’s neat, sure, but not clean. No amount of scrubbing would be able to make a dent in the deep-set shabbiness that has settled into the bones of the _One and Only_. When Kun glances to the left, he catches a glimpse into the cockpit through the open door. His fingers twitch at the sight of the empty pilot’s chair. This particular ship looks a mess (Kun can’t help but think that the state of a ship reflects the merit of its captain) but in general, the VCX-100 models are good little boats. It must be a blast to fly.

He turns to the right and walks into the common area of the ship. Although someone has gone to the trouble of keeping things fairly tidy, stacks of unmarked cargo crates fill every spare corner. The great, round cylinder of the hyperdrive sits at the center of the common area, decorated with Lunar New Year decorations from two years ago. Loth-cat claw marks score most of the furniture.

Without warning, Louis zips through Kun’s legs with a high-pitched screech. Another droid—a round little BE unit wearing, of all things, a bright pink sweater—and the Loth-cat come in hot on its heels. Just as Kun lifts one foot up to avoid stepping on the Loth-cat, the BE unit bumps against his other ankle, setting him off-balance. He wobbles, stumbling back and nearly falling on his ass.

 _Nearly_ falling on his ass. Because Johnny—of all people, _Johnny_ —catches him, mostly by virtue of just being _big_ and in the way and only partially by merit of his quick reflexes reaching out to catch Kun against his chest.

( _A very nice chest,_ Kun notes, disgusted with himself.)

He looks up, only to regret it when he comes face to face with Johnny’s self-satisfied smirk. “Oopsie daisy,” says the captain, amusement evident in his voice.

Kun shoves the guy away and regains his feet on his own. He gives the droids and the Loth-cat the evil eye but the three perpetrators pay him no mind, too busy chasing one another in circles around the galley table. Kun buries the temptation to stick his foot out and trip them. _No sense in being petty to droids,_ he tells himself, taking measured breaths in and out of his nose. _No sense in being petty to droids, no sense in being petty to droids, no sense in being petty—_

Unfazed by Kun’s near tumble, Johnny and Ten continue their conversation as they enter the common area. “There’s just me, Yukhei, and Chenle, so y’all have plenty of room to spread out in here. Turret’s down there,” he says, pointing down into the gun well situated at the center of the common area, just behind the hyperdrive. “‘Nother one at the front, under the nose.”

Kun throws a sharp look over his shoulder. “You expecting to run into heat?”

“I never _expect_ anything,” laughs Johnny, “but I never say never.”

Kun turns back to poking around the galley and silently pats himself on the back for not pointing out that Johnny just said ‘never’ three times in one sentence.

The captain plops down in a chair and kicks his boots up with a sigh, completely at ease. “Where are you folks headed in such a hurry, anyways? Alliance base, I assume?”

Ten kneels on the floor, playing with Louis, the Loth-cat, and the other droid. At the question, he looks up and shrugs blankly. “Dunno, really. Where _are_ we going, boy scout?”

“Stop calling me that,” Kun gripes. “And we’re meeting up with my flagship, the Alliance _Vision_. I lost contact with them before I… _crashed_ , so I don’t know their exact coordinates anymore. I’ll have to establish a commlink with them when we’re out of range of Nal Hutta.”

Johnny hums. “Why don’t you link with them now?”

“Nal Hutta is the homeworld of the galaxy’s most notorious godfathers, all of whom have a vested interest in upholding Imperial rule,” Kun retorts. “I’d rather delay an hour or two to create a safety net than lead a fleet of Imperial star destroyers to the Alliance like a bantha-brained nerf-herder.”

Neither Ten nor Johnny seem to find any further flaw in that logic. The smuggler smacks both hands against the armrests of his chair and hauls himself out of it. “Well,” he grunts, standing with his hands on his hips. “This starship won’t fly itself. Make yourselves comfy. We’ll take off in about an hour.” He points a warning finger at Ten, and then at Kun. “And don’t touch anything.”

As soon as he disappears through the door, Kun sighs. “I hate this,” he says, voice low. “I don’t trust him.”

Ten shakes his head, still focused on scratching behind the Loth-cat’s ears. “Johnny is a jackass,” he says. “But he’s trustworthy.”

That’s rich coming from Ten, who, based on all accounts, betrayed the man in question. Kun scoffs. “Why should I believe you? You’re just as shady as he is.”

The Twi’lek tips his head to one side. He looks cat-like, too, especially with the little feline sitting in his lap. “Well,” he says slowly. “You’ve gotta trust somebody.”

✩

Hyuna’s penthouse has high, high ceilings with walls and floors made of Naboo marble. Rumor has it that Hyuna herself came from Naboo. Some say she was the child of a palace maid immigrated from Nagi; others say she’s the illegitimate half-blood child of the queen herself; and still others say she was handmaiden to the queen and betrayed her, leaving the palace with a cargo bay full of finery—a mere dent in the Naboo royal treasury.

Rumors are rumors, of course, but no one can deny that Hyuna’s style has definite Naboo flair, from the crystal chandeliers to the indoor gardens whose wide, green leaves turn the air humid. Red light wavers on the walls, turning the marble liquid as it reflects off the pools laid into the floor at intervals. One can hardly see the water features for all the foliage. Music—something with a heady beat—thrums through the penthouse, seeming to come from the walls themselves. The entire place is lush, expensive, even ostentatious. No other crime lord on Nar Shaddaa can match it as a show of wealth, save Grakkus himself.

Irene likes the way her heels sound echoing off of all that marble.

In the midst of it all on a gilded four-poster canopy bed sits Hyuna herself, accompanied as ever by two men. Rumors abound about those two, as well; whether they’re pets, or highly trained bodyguards, or hyper-realistic sex droids. Hyuna has draped one of them in infinite strings of fat, milky Naboo pearls and wispy, ruffled chiffon that looks iridescent, contrasting with his blue-grey hair in the strange light. The blonde one is nearly nude, save skin-tight leather trousers and a necklace of diamonds that drips over his collarbones. Tattoos cover his body instead, undulating in long, alluring lines as he moves to the music. His arms grip the frame of the canopy, showing off the muscles in his biceps and back. Hyuna watches him through half-lidded eyes, chewing on her turquoise necklace, and strokes the other man’s calf with one hand. He lies spread-eagle on the bed, his head hanging off the foot of the mattress. His half-lidded eyes stare into middle distance with the spaced-out haze that comes courtesy of a heavy dose of guilea spice.

Irene stops a respectful distance from the bed and waits to be noticed.

“Joohyun, baby,” Hyuna says. Her voice rumbles deep and rusty in her chest like a purr. “I only want good news, nothing bad. We absolutely can’t stomach any more bad news tonight, can we, Hui?” She pets the blue-haired man’s calf. He doesn’t reply.

From this angle, Irene can see Hyuna’s blaster lying on the bed. Her skirt—ruffled, translucent chiffon to match her man—covers most of the weapon but a glimpse of glittering platinum makes Irene hold back a smile. Rumors be damned, that blaster decorated with dangling strings of diamonds says everything a person needs to know about the Nagai crime lord Hyuna.

“I’ve tracked the Twi’lek’s whereabouts to the docks,” Irene reports. “He’s boarded a freighter captained by a human called Johnny Suh. Word on the street says he regularly smuggles for the Hutt.”

Hyuna’s lip curls. “Odious slug.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Her employer sits up, legs splayed and spine slouched lazily. Her bare toes wiggle as she considers her options. “I like Ten, really, I do,” she sighs, pouting. “But you understand, Joohyun, I just can’t have people running around the galaxy owing me money like that, I just can’t. I let one sad sack Twi’lek go and the next thing I know every two-bit smuggler and stim-head in my employ thinks they can cheat me. _Me_.” She stands on the bed, wobbling slightly on the mattress. Her black hair hangs in wild tangles around her face. “No one cheats a N’gai.”

Irene inclines her head. “Of course, ma’am. What would you have me do?”

Hyuna toddles forward to the edge of the bed, right next to where her spiced-out companion’s head lolls. She reaches up and braces herself with one hand on the canopy’s crossbar so she can lean forward into Irene’s space. Her breath smells like artificial cherries.

“Get him for me, would you, baby?” Hyuna’s mouth is a candy stripe, red lip against white teeth against red tongue against white teeth against red lip. “Bring that naughty kitten back to the nest.”

Chills race up the length of Irene’s arms, spreading over her shoulders and raising the hair on the back of her neck. Although her jacket sleeves cover her arms, Irene can’t help but feel that Hyuna can see right through them to her anticipatory goosebumps. The feeling doubles when Hyuna smiles like the Loth-cat that got the cream.

Irene salutes in the traditional Nagai style, earning an even wider smile from her employer. “Yes, ma’am.”

Without another word, Hyuna turns around and walks to the middle of the bed, arms out to steady herself as her body sways back and forth to the beat of the music. Irene turns to leave, taking it as her dismissal.

Just as she reaches the doors, Hyuna calls after her. “Oh, and Joohyun?”

Irene pauses, looking over her shoulder. Hyuna sits cross-legged in the center of the mattress, back to the door, spine straight as she stares straight ahead at the wall. “Yes, ma’am?” she asks.

Without turning to face her, Hyuna continues, “Bring him alive, if you can… but if you find he can’t be reasoned with…” She twists to look over her shoulder, eyes wide and coy. “You have my permission to blow that dirty little freighter out of the sky.”

A smile curls Irene’s lips. “Yes, ma’am.”

✩

“This is the _One and Only_ requesting clearance for take off,” Johnny repeats into his commlink. The Nar Shaddaa docks are always clogged with ships coming and going at this hour. He’s been hailing the control tower for fifteen minutes trying to shoehorn the _One and Only_ into the queue. Unfortunately, corruption and lust for money pervades the culture of the Smuggler’s Moon on every level, including the air traffic control booth, and Johnny doesn’t have the credits to spare to bribe a traffic controller for a better spot in line.

Static buzzes back at him for about thirty seconds before he gets fed up and jams the comm switch. “Krystal, you kriffing Sithspawn, I know you’re up there and I know you know it’s me. For stars’ sake, if you don’t let me off this rock I’ll tell the whole galaxy that we—”

A dispatch interrupts him. “Oh, come on, Suh, you’re no fun.” Static feedback distorts the voice but it’s still recognisably Krystal. “Attention crew of the _One and Only_ , you’ll receive clearance shortly, standby for take off.”

“ _One and Only_ , standing by.”

“About time,” says a voice in the door. Johnny swivels around to see Chenle and Yukhei ducking into the cockpit (well, _Yukhei_ ducks. Chenle just enters). Oil and engine grease stain their arms up to the elbows. Chenle has some on his cheek. He bounces into the co-pilot’s chair and starts flipping switches to start the pre-flight check. “Thought we were gonna rust to the docking attachments and become one with the planet.”

Johnny licks his thumb, reaches across, and scrubs at the smear of black on the kid’s cheek. His first mate screeches in protest. He ignores it. “Krystal was kriffing with us,” he explains. “And I had to make sure our esteemed guests were settled in.”

“Why are we giving these guys a ride, anyways?” asks Yukhei. He leans against the back of Chenle’s chair on his elbows. “Chenle said that the stranger looks like a Rebellion type. Feels like asking for trouble to take on a Rebel passenger when we’re supposed to be on the job for Grakkus.”

“The Rebel passenger _is_ our job for Grakkus,” explains Johnny. “The guy promised us thirty thousand credits to deliver him safely back to his base. It’ll be just enough to pay off what we owe.”

Yukhei’s jaw drops in disbelief. “ _How_ many thousand?”

Chenle cackles. “Thirty-kay credits to hitchhike? What a kriffing sucker.” He pulls his legs into his chair. “How much in advance?”

A conspicuous silence follows. Johnny clears his throat and fiddles with a few of the dials on the dashboard.

“You didn’t get an advance?! Cap!”

“He had his blaster pointed at my twin suns!” Johnny insists, voice going high pitched in defense. “Those are the moneymakers, you know.”

Chenle snorts. “Your _balls_ are the moneymakers?”

Before Johnny can defend himself, Yukhei cuts in.“Are you sure they’re not scamming us?” he frets. “It is Ten, after all. He’s taken advantage of you before, who’s to say he won’t do it again?”

“I don’t think we really have a choice, bud.” Johnny shakes his head. “Where else are we gonna find thirty thousand credits within the week? It’s not ideal but it’s better than coming back to Grakkus empty-handed.” He turns back to his controls, squaring his shoulders to project the easy confidence that he knows his crew likes to see. “Don’t worry guys,” he says with a grin. “I’ve got a good feeling about this.”

Both of his crewmates groan in unison. “Oh, kriff,” Chenle moans, flipping the last few toggles for the take off sequence. “Now we’re _doomed_.”

✩

Take off goes smoothly, for values of smoothly that equal, ‘nothing explodes or falls off as they punch through the moon’s atmosphere’ (well, nothing _important,_ anyways. Their last scrap with Jeonghan might’ve knocked a few… _superficial_ exterior instruments loose. Johnny hears some clanking along the top shell that can’t bode well for those elements but they don’t get any urgent messages from the engineering deck so he assumes it’s nothing they need to stay airborne.

(Does it count as airborne when you’re in space?)

Next to him, Chenle flips on the flight stabiliser. “Just cleared Nar Shaddaa’s satellite field. Soon as we reach open space we’ll make the jump to lightspeed.”

Rising from his chair, Johnny claps his co-pilot’s shoulder. “You have the helm, bud.”

Chenle replies only by lifting a thumbs up over his head for Johnny to see as he exits the cockpit. The door scarcely closes behind him before he hears Chenle turn on the radio, cranking the volume up on the sports station. His favorite Nuna-ball team must be playing.

About halfway through taking care of business in his cabin’s fresher, the first laser volley hits the ship. The blast sends Johnny careening across his cabin. He falls heavily onto his back with a grunt, unable to keep his balance with his pants shoved down to mid-thigh. Impact alarms start to blare in flashes of red. Chenle’s voice comes over the ship’s intercom system, high with excitement: “Attention all passengers and crew, we seem to be taking some—” Another hit shakes the ship, cutting Chenle off mid-sentence and sending Johnny sliding on his bare ass across the cabin floor. “ _Ahem_ … some fire from an unmarked vessel. I suggest you all strap in, ‘cause this pleasure cruise is about to get a lil’ bumpy.” His cabin’s isolated intercom buzzes and Chenle says, “Hey, cap, now’s probably a good time for you to report to the cockpit, yeah?”

“Working on it!” Johnny shouts. “Kriff, kriff, kriff,” he swears under his breath, trying to lift his hips so he can pull his _godsdamned_ pants up. The heels of his boots scrabble for purchase on the slick durasteel floor. “Kriffing— kriff.”

A third impact sends the ship listing to one side. Johnny uses the momentum to slide over to the wall (his buttcheeks making an embarrassing squeaking noise the entire way). Using the wall for support, he climbs to his feet and dashes out into the hall, still hiking up his britches.

He skids through the door and immediately collides with the rebel. Instinctively, Johnny grabs onto the man’s shoulders to steady them both as the ship does a quick evasive dip to the side. The latter’s hands come to each of his elbows, holding on. Chenle’s voice floats down the corridor towards them, cursing up a storm.

“What are you doing?” Johnny asks, not really expecting an answer. “You should go strap in, it’s dangerous.”

Kun’s eyes spark, bright and determined, all pupil with just a sliver of deep brown iris. It must be true what people say about all Rebels being adrenaline junkies. “We’re under fire,” he says. If Johnny didn’t know better, he’d swear a hint of a smile flickered around Kun’s mouth. “You need a gunner.”

Well, when you put it that way— “Yeah… I do need a gunner.” Johnny grins, readjusting his grip to grab Kun’s bicep. He tugs the latter down the hall towards the cockpit. “Welcome to the crew, Gunner Qian.”

“I’m not on your crew, _pirate._ ” It astonishes Johnny how they can be in the middle of a dogfight and still people like Kun can find the time and headspace to be contrary. “Consider it the advance on your payment.”

Johnny shoves Kun towards the ladder down to the nose turret. “You can call it whatever you want so long as your trigger finger’s good.” He slides into the pilot’s chair and slips on his headset before taking hold of the yoke. “Lele, what's going on?” His co-pilot grunts, wrestling with his own yoke for a moment before hitting the switch to pass control over to Johnny. The yoke immediately judders in Johnny’s hands. The ship jolts in response. “Whoa,” Johnny mutters.

Without losing a moment, Chenle leans across the ship’s dashboard, working his magic to give the ship everything he can. “Whoa is right,” he says. “Whoever this is ain’t too fond of us.”

“Have you gotten a visual on the ship?”

“Not good enough to tell who it belongs to.” Chenle gives him a truly scathing side-eye. “Was a _little_ busy doing evasive maneuvers while my pilot was on the shitter.”

Down in the nose turret, Kun snorts. Ears red, Johnny tsks. “I know, I know.” He hails the engineering bay. “Yukhei, buddy, status report.”

Yukhei’s voice comes through his headset. The engine runs loud in the background. “Fine, I’m fine. All essential systems still online. Engine is, you know, not dead. Our port… starboard? My starboard, your port. Anyways, one of our wings is, um, exploded, a little bit. But it should be fine. Probably.” Another blast shakes the ship in impeccable timing.

Johnny swears and pulls the ship into a barrel roll, twisting away from the enemy ship’s volley. Once they’re right side up again, he shouts, “Would love _slightly_ more confidence from my engineer right now, my dude!”

A short, decidedly _not_ confident pause follows wherein mechanical clanking noises echo over Johnny’s headset. “It’ll be _fine_ ,” Yukhei finally says, voice high pitched and vowels long in the way he gets when he’s lying. “I’m sending Bella out now to help me do some damage control.”

“Keep me posted.” Johnny leans to the side in his seat, looking down into the nose turret. “You ready, rebel?”

A single middle finger raises out of the gun well. Johnny grins. “Hold onto your butts.”

He throws on the brakes, dropping in space, and immediately pulls up to do a loop. The ship pursuing them is faster than the _One and Only_. It zips past them as they drift, thrusters sputtering, towards the top of the loop. The faster they get that damned ship in their sights, the sooner Kun can get aim and blow the damned thing to high heaven. The rebel gets a few shots of returning fire off but Johnny still holds the ship back in its suspended curve, leaning forward to squint through the windshield at the enemy vessel.

It’s a Lancer-class, an old ship from the days of the Clone Wars, but it’s in remarkably good repair. The disc of its main body looks sharp and lethal regardless of its age and its well-polished durasteel glints in the reflection of the sun. Whoever owns the ship has shaved the serial number off the hull—because of course they have—and although Johnny can think of plenty of folks who might want him dead, he can’t think of anyone he knows who owns a Lancer.

 _Kriff_. Lancers may not have the maneuverability of a proper starfighter but they are thin, _fast_ , heavily armed, and hard to hit. Johnny hopes beyond hope that Kun has some skill to back up his big attitude.

“One of your exes?” asks Chenle. Johnny lets go of the yoke with one hand to shove him in the shoulder. “What?!” the co-pilot screeches, laughing. “Can you blame me for asking?!”

Johnny shakes his head. “You know, if you spent as much time practicing your flying as you do your wit, you’d be the best pilot in the galaxy by now.” Below them, the Lancer twists, realigning itself for a new attack. “Alright, big shot,” Johnny calls below. “Time to test that trigger finger, yeah?”

Kun snaps back, “Shut up and drive, flyboy!”

Fair enough. He punches the thrusters, dropping out of their loop to stay behind the Lancer as best as possible. It’s hard because, once again, _fast_ , not to mention the _One and Only_ is limping without full functionality of one of its wings. Fortunately, Johnny is a damn good pilot.

From below, Kun nips at the heels of the Lancer with short, quick bursts of laser fire. Few of the shots do any substantial damage. “Wong,” Johnny calls into his headset. “Tell me something good.”

“We’re doing all we can, Cap!” Yukhei’s voice sounds desperate and, in a word, stressed. “Just try to divert fire away from the port side!”

“Aye, aye,” Johnny mutters. After this job, he’s going to take a long, _long_ vacation on a very sunny planet with no bounty hunters or smugglers or gangsters or bucketheads… Just Johnny, an Ishi Tib-cracked coconut with a bendy straw, and some cute local.

In front of him, the Lancer twists, trying to use its speed to loop around them. Johnny hauls back on the yoke, yelling with the effort as the ship’s momentum throws them sideways. In his headset, Ten announces something about being on the dorsal gun. Johnny can’t spare the concentration to acknowledge.

Try as he might, the _One and Only_ just isn’t fast enough to compete with the Lancer’s maneuvering. The enemy ship spins and fires on them. Johnny wrenches the yoke to the side—there’s no avoiding the lasers entirely but he can at least angle the ship to protect the damaged portside. They take the hit nearly head on. Somewhere in the back, Louis screeches.

Through gritted teeth, Chenle warns, “We can’t keep taking hits like that, Cap.”

“I know, I know. Holy _hell_ , that thing is fast.” The people who built this freighter didn’t build it with interspace dogfights in mind. “Can you open a link with the other ship?”

Kun’s voice floats up to him. “What, are you gonna _talk_ them out of shooting at us?”

“I don’t know!” Johnny gives the thrusters more juice, skidding out of a turn. They’re faring better with two gunners than they were with just one but there’s only so much he can do to line them up for better shots when their opponent is faster than a greased Ewok. “Right now I’m just trying to think of alternatives to getting blown to shards in the vacuum of space!”

“Hailing the other ship now,” Chenle says.

The picture flickers to life in blue over the dashboard, revealing the face of their attacker: a woman dressed in Mandalorian armor, sans helmet. Blessedly, the Lancer pauses in its attack.

“Hi,” Johnny says, doing his best to not sound _too_ out of breath. “How are ya?”

“Captain and crew of the _One and Only_ ,” she says, voice hard as steel. “You are currently harboring a fugitive of Kim Hyuna, leader of the Pearl Knife. Surrender the Twi’lek called Ten to me now and you may go on your way.”

 _A kriffing bounty hunter_ , thinks Johnny. _Of-kriffing-course._ If they get out of this skirmish alive, he really _is_ going to tie Ten to the comm antenna by his lekku. “So sorry, Miss Mandalorian, ma’am, but I haven’t seen hide’r hair of Ten since he jacked my haul a few months back. Give ‘im hell for me when you find him, though.” Next to him, Chenle starts flipping switches to punch up for a jump. “Good talk, nice to meet you, we’ll be seein’ you around—”

The Lancer fires two warning shots right over their cockpit. “ _Don’t_ play with me, smuggler. My employer wants the Twi’lek alive but I won’t hesitate to shoot that shitty little freighter of yours into litter.”

Johnny huffs. Under his breath, he mutters, “Shitty?”

On the holo, the Mandalorian raises her chin. “My patience is short. Whether you give him to me or not, I will have the Twi’lek.”

Chenle shoots him an urgent look, eyes wide. “Cap,” he whispers.

“I’m thinking,” Johnny mumbles, shaking his head minutely. The Lancer outmatches them in speed and firepower but the _One and Only_ has the advantage of youth, agility, and a bigger crew. And—not to brag, but—it has Johnny. He didn’t make it as a smuggler for this long without picking up a few tricks along the way.

He nods. “Alright. Prepare your hatch. We’ll pull up over your top hatch to make the connection.” The Mandalorian nods once and disconnects their transmission.

Not even a second later, Kun’s head pokes up out of the gun well. “You’re giving him up?” he demands, pushing the mouthpiece of his headset out of the way. “He’ll die!”

“Nobody’s giving anybody up. Get back in your turret,” Johnny orders, getting up from the pilot’s chair and leaving the cockpit in a few long strides. His head buzzes, grasping for the disjointed pieces of his plan and trying to cram them together into a full picture.

Johnny can feel the temperature raise by several degrees as he descends into the engineering deck. The heat only grows stronger as he passes through the cargo bay to reach the engine room. “Yukhei? Tell me my power core is stable.”

All that can be seen of Yukhei are his legs, sticking out from underneath said power core. “Your power core is stable. Bella, hydrospanner.” He slides out from underneath on his rollerboard and throws a hexdriver at his open toolkit in a wobbling arc. His BE droid rolls up, pushing the hydrospanner within reach. “Are we done getting shot at or should I continue holding this ship together with spacer’s tape and fervent prayer?”

“Consider this a brief intermission.” He crosses over to the floor hatch in the center of the room. He throws the hatch’s first door open, peering down through the small porthole on the second door as the _One and Only_ slowly trucks into position over the bounty hunter’s Lancer. “I need you to do that thing.”

“What thing?”

“The thing we did on Toydaria.”

Yukhei drops the hydrospanner with a loud _clunk_. “We almost _died_ on Toydaria!”

“We’re not gonna die.” Johnny picks up the hydrospanner and shoves it back into Yukhei’s arms. He grins. “Have a little faith.”

Slowly, the grin spreads to Yukhei’s face, too, almost like he can’t help himself. “We only have one firebomb left.”

Johnny slaps Yukhei’s shoulder. “Well, then you better make it count.” He jogs out of the engine room but not before calling over his shoulder, “On my signal, Wong!”

“Copy that!”

He makes it halfway back up the ramp before he runs into Ten, and just behind him, Kun. Ten shoves him bodily. It’s hard enough to make Johnny stumble a few steps down the ramp. “What the hell?”

Ten’s lekku curl and writhe in anger. “You’re selling me _out_?!” he spits. “I know I was shitty to you in the past but this— this is low, Suh. After everything, after all the history we have—”

Johnny catches Ten’s hands as he reaches out to push him again. “Don’t get excited. _Nobody_ is selling _anybody_ out.” He shoots a quick glare at Kun over Ten’s shoulder. Kun has the decency to look awkward. “I have a plan.”

Ten narrows his eyes. “What plan?”

✩

“Just for the record,” says Ten. “I hate this plan.”

“It’ll work,” Johnny insists. _Probably_.

Johnny and his… _partner-in-crime_ , so to speak, huddle over the engine room hatch, outfitted for a space walk with oxygen masks and pressure suits. “Bring her in close, Chenle. And make sure the gunners are ready.” Johnny says into the engine room headset. “We got one shot at this.”

“Yes, Cap. Pulling into position in five.”

Johnny looks up at Yukhei, who hovers nearby cradling their last homemade explosive to his chest like a baby. “Yukhei.”

Yukhei looks up, eye wide. “Yeah?”

He fixes the engineer with a firm look. “Don’t miss.” He straps his mask on and focuses down through the hatch porthole at the ship below. They’re moments away from aligning with the Lancer’s top hatch.

Chenle counts down the timing to the second. “Three… two… one… Prompting the Lancer for visual confirmation.” A few beats pass, and then he says, “It’s just like you said. The scary lady wants to see Ten first.”

“Roger, roger.” Johnny grabs the man beside him by the bicep. “Get ready for your close up.”

He nods, silent behind his helmet. Only Johnny can hear the slight waver in the breathing patterns of his oxygen mask.

Johnny pats him on the back. “Don’t be nervous. I’ve done this before and it worked out great.”

Yukhei peers over the edge of the hatch. “Yeah, but that time we were inside an oxygenated atmosphere, not the vacuum of space.” The engineer shrinks back under the force of Johnny’s _shut-the-kriff-up_ glare.

“Okay, Xuxi,” Chenle says. “The ship’s atmo bubble is a little wonky because _someone_ keeps putting off getting it fixed—”

Johnny rolls his eyes. “Chenle,” he warns.

“—but you should have thirty seconds to complete the drop, retract the space walk cable, and close the hatch before you, you know, get sucked into the—”

“—the vacuum of space,” Yukhei finishes. His face pales. “Got it. No worries.”

The hatch’s lock disengages with a clunk, shifting under Johnny’s feet. His space walk partner grips tighter onto his shoulder. “Disengaging hatch,” Chenle announces over the headset.

Johnny readjusts his hold so it looks less reassuring and more restraining. “Walking in five.” He looks at the other but he can’t see through the helmet’s star visor. In a lowered voice, he asks, “You ready?” The answer comes as a wordless nod. Not the most reassuring thing ever but Johnny doesn’t have time to be picky. He crouches, bringing the other down with him, and lifts the hatch’s latch. “Three, two—”

Space walking always makes Johnny’s heart hammer in his chest. Cognitively he knows that it isn’t that much different from sailing a ship in space but something about his actual body being one small pane of glass and layer of fabric away from literal _nothingness_ gives him the heebie jeebies.

They drop out of the hatch together. Johnny’s stomach jerks as they leave the artificial gravity field of the ship’s interior and start their slow free float towards the Lancer below.

He catches himself holding his breath as he waits for the bounty hunter to open her hatch. The atmo bubble will only last for so long; if she doesn’t open it soon, Yukhei will miss his critical moment and be forced to close the hatch without dropping their little payload-of-one.

Only when the vault handle atop the Lancer’s hatch spins does Johnny allow himself to breathe. “Top hatch opening,” he murmurs. “Get ready.”

His fake prisoner squeezes his arm. “Don’t let go of me,” he whispers.

Johnny glances down, surprised. “I won’t.”

The hatch opens but Johnny can’t see the bounty hunter inside. She must have opened it remotely from the cockpit. It makes sense; a solitary pilot rarely leaves the cockpit unless the situation absolutely calls for it. It lowers the chances of being taken unawares.

Fortunately, they were counting that.

The moment the Lancer’s hatch door opens wide enough to touch the hull on the other side, Johnny kicks off of the edge of the _One and Only’s_ hatch shaft and shouts, “Drop it, now!”

The force of his kick swings him around hard enough that when the space walk tether catches on the edge of the hatch door it jerks _hard_ on the back of his pressure suit and carries them both into the hull of the _One and Only_. Underneath him, his space walk partner grunts as his back collides hard with the durasteel shell.

In his left peripheral, Johnny sees the firebomb drop through the short space between the ships, turning head over tail as it falls towards its target: the interior of the enemy Lancer.

“Pull us back!” he orders, wrapping one arm tight around the other man’s waist and yanking on the tether with the other hand. “Pull us ba—”

He feels rather than hears the metallic pound of the Lancer’s hatch slamming shut. Johnny scarcely has time to think, _No_ , before the closing door clips the end of the firebomb half a second before it falls into the enemy ship, sending it wobbling away from its target and directly into the ship’s hull. It explodes on impact, meters away from where Johnny clings to the _One and Only_ like a tick on a dog’s back, blowing superficial debris off the Lancer. Below them, the Lancer pulls away at high speed.

Dread washes through Johnny when he feels the tension of the space walk tether—the only thing keeping him connected to the ship—suddenly go slack. “Kriff,” he breathes, scrabbling for something— _anything—_ to hold onto. He bumps against an antenna that protrudes from the side and grabs it with one hand, the other holding tight onto his partner. “Yukhei, the tether snapped, we’re—”

Either Yukhei can’t hear him or they’ve decided to go rogue. The _One and Only_ starts to pick up speed, as well. Towards the front of the ship, the nose turret starts to fire on the Lancer in bright, intermittent bursts of red.

Johnny tries not to make a habit of giving up. He knows that he’s smart and capable, his crew equally so, and he trusts his instincts, especially his instincts of when to give up. His mental risk-reward calculator rarely fails him. But as the Lancer starts to return fire and he feels the _One and Only_ pull into a spinning barrel roll to evade the enemy lasers, he thinks, _Oh my gods, we might actually die._

Trapped between Johnny’s chest and the ship, his space walk buddy (slash possible partner in death?) reaches up to shove the tinted star visor out of the way. The dark shield slides back, revealing the full white-hot fury of Kun’s death glare.

“Don’t you dare give up,” he threatens in a shout. His talk sounds big but the rapid, shallow in-and-out of his oxygen mask betrays his terror. “If you give up and let us be flung into deep space I’ll never forgive you. I’m not gonna die risking my ass for a bunch of criminals.”

It’s a ridiculous time to be laughing but Johnny can’t help himself.

The force of the ship’s movement drags at Johnny’s body, like all the laws of physics are against him. He has a vice grip on the antenna but it won’t last long. Every time the ship tacks and throws his weight in a new direction, the whip-thin aerial pulls at the root.

A particularly sharp turn throws his body against the belly of the boat. Poor Kun groans. Every time a new move pins Johnny to the ship, Kun takes the brunt of the blow, caught between the hull and Johnny’s chest.

Clenching his teeth, Johnny grits out, “Friendly reminder that Kun and I are _still out here_.”

Chenle responds, frantic. “Sorry, sorry!”

The sentence barely leaves his mouth before a blast makes contact half a meter away from Johnny’s side. Instinctively, he curls his body around Kun’s, turning to absorb the sparks and metal shrapnel blown off the hull with his back. “Chenle!” he bellows.

“I know! I know! That was an accident!” Panic courses through the co-pilots voice. “The good news is that even though the firebomb didn’t make target, it still took out one of her ion engines, which means she won’t be able to safely sail out of a couple parsecs’ radius of a habited planet. Not unless she’s batshit crazy, anyways.”

Ten chimes in, staticky through the headset. “She’s a Mandalorian, of course she’s batshit crazy.”

“She’s a Mandalorian,” Johnny repeats. “She may be batshit, but she’s not that kind of batshit.” The Lancer zips past, too close for comfort, and Johnny winces. “I don’t care how you do it, just get us out of this dogfight before Kun and I get ghosted.”

“Working on it—”

The antenna slips suddenly, pulling out of its attachment. It dangles from the port by a few wires—thick wires, but wires nonetheless. “Work on it faster!” Johnny hollers.

Somewhere above, the Lancer continues to fire on the _One and Only_. The shots on the top of the ship can’t reach Johnny and Kun. Still, they see plenty of the sparks that shower down either side of the boat from above. The craft was in a sore state before they decided to try their little stunt; it won’t be able to take much more fire before everyone is kriffed.

Johnny eyeballs the hatch shaft a few meters away. At some point, Yukhei closed the hatch to avoid being exposed when the atmo bubble expired. The other end of their ill-fated tether flaps, pinched shut in the hatch door. If he times it right, Johnny might be able to let go of the antenna and catch the hatch door instead. Since the hatch shaft has a two-door airlock system, they should be able to crawl inside the shaft and shelter from the crossfire until Yukhei has enough time to reestablish the atmo bubble and allow them back onboard.

Theoretically, of course.

He looks down at Kun, opening his mouth to explain his plan. At that very moment, the antenna decides to give up the ghost.

Johnny’s heart drops into his asshole. The world outside his helmet spins as he tumbles, wrenched away from his grasp on Kun. Oddly detached from his body, he watches his own hands reach out for a handhold in vain. The ship’s hull slips through his field of vision, too far away for him to make contact. _I’m dead_ , he thinks. _I’m going to float aimlessly through the cold wastes of space_ _until I gradually run out of air and asphyxiate._

No sooner does the thought enter his head than his tailspin is sharply arrested. Johnny whips his head around, following the sharp spear of pain that wrenches his shoulder. Kun has caught him by the wrist, hanging onto the handle of their hatch door by the tips of the fingers on his opposite hand.

“Kun—” he gasps. He feels Kun’s grip slip a fraction. “The hatch—”

Kun starts to curl his arm to pull Johnny closer to himself, groaning through his teeth with the effort. The lack of gravity renders Johnny weightless but the intense velocity of the vessel drags them both, doing its best to shed them from the ship’s belly. Johnny can hardly lift his other arm against the force of it.

As soon as Kun pulls him close enough, he brings Johnny’s wrist close to his belt. Johnny gets a good grip on it, allowing Kun to free his other hand to disengage the manual release on the hatch door. It falls open abruptly. For a moment, Johnny worries that it’ll shake them loose but Kun holds firm. After taking a moment to readjust his grip, the latter starts to climb up into the shaft, dragging them both hand over hand.

The moment his legs clear the hatch’s opening, Kun pants, “Close it!”

Hanging onto Kun with one hand, he stretches the other arm down, drags the severed tether into the shaft, and hauls the door shut, sealing them in (which, seriously, must’ve been like a superhuman display of strength, like when moms lift speeders off their children or trapped hikers chew their arms off to free themselves or whatever).

After the rush of riding the starship bareback, the tiny cylinder of the airlock shaft feels preternaturally still. For a moment, all Johnny registers is the hard rasp of their oxygen masks trying to regulate their hard breathing. This close, he can see the cloud of condensation on the inside of Kun’s helmet expand and contract with each breath. As an afterthought, he relaxes his hold on Kun’s belt, prying his fingers open one by one. The joints ache from the death grip he’d kept on it.

Kun laughs a little bit, high and borderline delirious. His head lolls back, resting against the wall with a bump. “Next time,” he says, “tell Ten to be his own decoy.”

Johnny laughs, too, even though he feels more like crying from sheer, unadulterated relief at the moment. He’s considering converting to some kind of religion. “Chenle,” he pants. “Kun and I are sealed into the hatch shaft. Feel free to get fancy.”

Chenle makes a relieved sound into the receiver. “Copy that, Captain. I’ll send Yukhei down to let you on board as soon as we shake ‘er.”

They float in silence for a few moments, toes barely touching the hatch door in the zero-gravity. Johnny listens to the ships exchange fire just outside their little safe space. Every now and then, an impact will send them bumping gently into one another. Johnny watches Kun rub at his own shoulder. He probably wrenched it when he snatched Johnny out of midair (well, ‘air.’ Snatched him out of mid _space_ , more appropriately).

The rebel’s eyes open, catching him mid-stare. Johnny doesn’t bother pretending to look elsewhere. There aren’t many other places he could be looking in an airlock shaft barely large enough to hold them both.

Kun looks away first. “Do you know when they can let us out of here?” he asks, so low it’s nearly a whisper. They’re close enough—nearly chest to chest—that Johnny hears him regardless.

Another hit rattles the ship. Johnny wraps one arm around Kun’s waist and braces the other against the side of the shaft behind Kun’s back to keep himself from crushing Kun against the wall again. “Soon,” he murmurs. “My crew is good. They’ve gotten me out of tighter scrapes.”

A shaky exhale passes Kun’s lips, a little thing that means to sound like a laugh but is too fragile to be convincing. It’s so close that Johnny almost expects to feel the warmth of it against his collarbone. “It’s hard to imagine a tighter scrape than the one we were just in.”

At that moment, Johnny realises two things: 1) Qian Kun is, in fact, very, very handsome with his button nose and his full lips and the chic little mole under the arch of his sophisticated eyebrows, and 2) Qian Kun is, in fact, very, very _close_ , held tight against his body by Johnny’s own treacherous arm.

A flush starts to creep up his neck. He thanks the gods of his newfound faith that his pressure suit’s collar hides it from view. “I’ve been in tighter.” His voice comes out slightly hoarse, which is just _so_ cringey that Johnny barely holds back from wincing. He clears his throat as subtly as he can before continuing, “I shouldn’t have asked you to do that. You didn’t sign up to risk your skin for spacers you barely know.”

“I’m a soldier. I couldn’t let a civilian risk their life in my place,” Kun replies, matter-of-fact. His eyes have gone slightly absent, as though his focus elsewhere. Johnny hopes he isn’t concussed. “Besides—”

The _ka-chunk_ of the top hatch being disengaged cuts his thought short. As the airlock opens with a hiss, the ship’s gravity takes effect. Kun wobbles, unsteady, and Johnny holds him closer to his chest to compensate for the rebel’s space legs.

“Oh! So sorry.” Ten grins down at them from above, looking infuriatingly pleased with himself. “Chenle sent me down to fetch you two crazy kids before we made the jump to lightspeed. But don’t let me interrupt…” He plays at closing the hatch door again.

Johnny stops him with a hand. “Oh, go kriff yourself.” He climbs out of the airlock, takes off his helmet, and then turns to offer Kun a hand up only to find him already clambering out on his own. When Kun finally gets upright, he sways on his feet, looking moments away from crumpling into a heap on the floor. His hands pry ineffectually at the release for his helmet.

Ten’s fake eyebrows raise. “You okay, boy scout?”

Moving on pure instinct (no, really, pure instinct, instinct and absolutely nothing else! He swears!), Johnny hurries back to Kun’s side, slipping Kun’s arm around his shoulders to support his weight. Kun leans heavily against him, his legs working more for balance than for carrying any of his weight. “Whoa, whoa. Let’s get you some first aid, rebel.” He looks up from Kun to Ten. “I need to go check on things with Chenle and Yukhei. Take him to the common area and get him fixed up.”

When he passes Kun to Ten, the Twi’lek gives him a suggestive look, waggling his fake eyebrows. “You two got awful cosy out there, huh?”

Johnny shoves his helmet into Ten’s stomach and walks away, shaking his head. He learned a long time ago that nothing good comes from rising to Ten’s bait. It’s better, he thinks, to focus on being the captain of his ship. Being the captain of his ship, and nothing else. The weird tickling sensation in his stomach can wait until later.

He makes a mental note to check his temperature when he patches up his own bumps and bruises.

The cockpit is a frenzy of beeping and flashing warning lights. Their hyperdrive must be functional, at the very least, since the lightspeed tunnel on the other side of the windshield looks fairly stable. Chenle sits in the co-pilots chair, reading strings of numbers off of his dials for Yukhei, who has cracked open one of the cockpit’s wall panels for emergency repairs. The engineer holds a fusing pen between his teeth, both hands buried up to the wrist in a tangle of wires.

Johnny pushes affectionately at Chenle’s head as he sits behind the controls. “Fancy flying, kiddo.”

Chenle acknowledges with a distracted half-grin. “So, status report— we’re limping. Our portside wing is in shreds. We’ve got about half a dozen various leaks and shorts—none of them part of essential life support but definitely stuff that we need for long haul flights—and our comms antenna is just… gone.” He opens both palms and makes a _poof_ noise. “Dunno how that happened. Oh, and you probably already know this, but the space walk tether is—”

“Snapped,” Johnny finishes. “I know. I know what happened to the comms antenna, too.” He groans. “Kriff, if the comms antenna is gone, that means—”

Chenle clicks his fingers and points at Johnny. “Ding ding ding! Our precious cargo can’t call his Rebel friends.” He flops back in his chair. The poor kid must be exhausted from the dogfight. “So, what’s the move?”

The question is a formality at best. They all know that there’s only one move to make. Chenle has even set the coordinates for the hyperspace jump already. “Where are those junk rat friends of yours hiding out now?”

To his left, the ship spits a shower of sparks at Yukhei and the engineer yelps, shaking his hand. “Sorry,” he says, sucking on two of his burnt fingers. “Aren’t they living in the ruins on D’Qar?”

“That’s the last I heard.” Chenle grabs a roll of electric tape off the dashboard and tosses it over to Yukhei, who catches it one-handed. “I set the coordinates for the Ileenium system.”

Johnny sighs. He wants a damn nap. “Awesome. Good job, kids. Keep holding down the fort.” When he gets up, a sharp ache shoots through his back. Chenle laughs at Johnny’s old man groan. “I’m gonna go check on our resident freedom fighter.”

✩

Alien anthropologists call the Twi’lek species ‘natural-born empathisers.’ The name comes courtesy of their lekku, which supposedly enhance the Twi’leks’ sensitivity to emotions. Twi’leks are said to be able to communicate a vast array of complex emotions to one another with a simple gesture of these lekku.

Knowing this, Kun can only assume that Ten is just choosing to ignore Kun’s blatant _You-kriffer-that-hurts_ signals.

“Ow. _Ow_.” He grabs Ten’s hand, holding it away from him. “You’re doing this on purpose.”

Ten rolls his eyes. “You humans are all such babies. Haven’t you ever heard of strength through pain?” He pushes against Kun’s grip, trying to overpower him.

 _‘Strength through pain,’ my ass._ Kun frowns. “Did you even wash your hands before you started treating me? You’re gonna give me an infection.”

“You can’t infect a bruise.” The Twi’lek pouts, crossing his arms, but Kun doesn’t buy it for a second.. “You weren’t like this when Johnny was helping you.”

The tips of Kun’s ears flush hot. “I was barely conscious when Johnny was helping me.” A sly gleam crawls into Ten’s eye. Kun scowls harder and shoves at Ten’s chest hard enough to push him backwards off his chair. “Shut up!”

Across the way, the common room door slides open. Johnny enters, looking clueless and good-natured—frustratingly so. He smiles, always ready to be let in on the joke. “We’re bullying Ten? What did he do?”

Ten raises his hands in an innocent gesture. “I didn’t say anything,” he insists.

“He’s mauling me,” Kun accuses. He gingerly prods the edges of the goose egg near the back of his head. “He has no bedside manner at all.”

Johnny snorts. “Yeah, if you’re looking for tender loving care you went to the wrong Twi’lek.”

A sense of foreboding creeps up the back of Kun’s neck when he catches sight of the downright conniving smirk on Ten’s face. Before he can do anything to stop whatever scheme the Twi’lek has planned for him, Ten holds out the first aid kit and says, “By all means, be my guest.”

Maybe Johnny is concussed, too, because he takes the first aid kit without really seeming to register what is being asked of him. Neither of them can get a word out in protest before Ten disappears through the doors with a flick of his lekku.

The captain looks down at the kit in his hands, up at Kun, back down to the kit, and then to Kun again. Kun sighs.

He points to Ten’s chair. “If you just leave it there, I’ll take care of it.”

Johnny shakes his head. “No, no, I’ll do it.” He sits down, picking through the kit’s contents. “How’s your head?”

“Fine.” Kun touches the tender spot at the back of his skull. “No concussion. Well, actually, I might have a concussion. I wrecked my X-wing yesterday.”

Johnny’s eyebrows raise. He raises a small flashlight, shining it first in Kun’s right eye, and then the left. “You’ve had a busy forty-eight hours, hero.”

That might be the understatement of the year. Another small, tired sigh escapes his chest. He can’t bother mustering up a reply. Fortunately, Johnny takes his cue. He works in silence, combing Kun’s hair to the side with care as he applies bacta patches first to the raised wound on the back of his head, and then to the bruise near his temple. The bacta is cool; so are Johnny’s fingers.

Those blessedly cool hands move to Kun’s injured shoulder. They touch over the fabric of his shirt like a silent question. Kun nods, reaching up to undo the buttons of his shirt so Johnny can slip it off his shoulder and apply the bacta to the joint. He leans back, resting his head against the wall of his fold-down bunk. The last time he rested, he’d been blown unconscious by a starship crash. Now that the bacta has begun to work its magic, his weariness makes itself known in every part of his body.

He doesn’t realise that his eyes have slipped shut until they open in surprise when Johnny says, “You saved me,” in a quiet voice.

Kun shrugs his uninjured shoulder. “I just did what anyone would’ve done.”

“I think you overestimate the kind of company I keep.” One of Johnny’s eyebrows arch. “Besides, you hate me.”

He lifts his head. “Just because I don’t like you doesn’t mean I’d let you _die_. Stars, you’re dense.”

Now Johnny shrugs. A playful little smile plays around his mouth. “I just thought, you know, your whole Rebel agenda was to rid the universe of scum and villainy.”

“The Alliance is ridding the galaxy of oppressive _fascism_.”

Johnny’s eyes flit up from Kun’s shoulder, sending him a teasing look through dark lashes. “Po-tay-to, po-tah-to?”

A stab of pain lances through his temples; a common side effect, apparently, of being in Johnny’s proximity. “No.”

The little smile breaks out into a wide, lopsided one. Johnny’s laugh is a low, huffing, bubbling thing. Kun would probably find it cute if he wasn’t so damn annoying.

Abruptly, Kun becomes very, very conscious of the fact that he’s halfway shirtless. He coughs, shallow and awkward, and scratches his chest with his free hand as an excuse to—at least partially—cover himself. Johnny either fails to notice or just doesn’t care. Kun isn’t sure which would be more embarrassing. “Are you almost done?”

“No need to get snippy, rebel.” Johnny sits back, using his thumb to smooth down the edge of the gentle adhesive tape holding the patch in place. “And… depends. You got any more boo-boos?”

He hurries to pull his shirt back over his shoulder. “No,” he snaps. Kun frowns down at his shirt as he tries to button it up. He curses his clumsy fingers. “You’re incorrigible, you know that?”

“I am, I really am.” Johnny wipes his sticky bacta fingers off on his trousers before reaching for the fastenings of his own shirt. He opens them at an alarming speed, completely unabashed.

Kun chokes. In an embarrassing, unmanful pitch, he squeaks, “What are you doing?”

Johnny laughs, shrugging his shirt off without so much as a blush. “Don’t get excited.”

And really, that— That is too much. Kun scoffs. “Honestly, you are— You have egregiously misread this situation if you think I have any interest whatsoever in— in—” He waves, vaguely tracing Johnny’s figure in midair. “Any of _that_.”

That damn eyebrow arches again. Just the sight of it infuriates Kun. The eyebrow added to Johnny’s amused laugh makes Kun’s teeth grind. “You know, you could stand to be a little sweeter to me. I pulled my shoulder, too.” He picks up a fresh bacta patch and waves it under Kun’s nose. “If you can manage to keep your lunch down, I thought you could at least return the favor.”

The next time Kun sets foot on terra firma, he’s going to bury himself alive. He snatches the patch out of Johnny’s hands. “Yeah,” he says, a little too loud. “Sure. No problem.”

Of course, Ten waits to return to the common area until Kun is beet-red, applying one of the extra-large bacta patches to Johnny’s very defined, very _shirtless_ shoulder; and, of course, when he comes back he brings everyone and their droids with him.

Kun has never been cat-called in binary before. The droid doesn’t fall far from the Twi’lek, apparently.

✩

The young crew of the _Dreamchaser_ —lovingly nicknamed ‘the Dreamies’ by their friends and colleagues—are ‘self-employed’ in much the same way as Johnny and his crew.

Of course, they prefer the term _‘freelancers_.’

It’s just as well, since they aren’t exactly smugglers, nor are they bounty hunters or spice runners. Although they have been known to traffic less-than-legal parts with their own ship (that Johnny knows is _very_ well outfitted for smuggling), the crew mainly makes their living repairing spacecraft. They specialise in discretion; many an unmarked or unregistered vessel has docked with the Dreamies to get fixed on the downlow.

On rare occasions, they even repair wanted ships.

However, part of exercising discretion in a rapidly expanding Empire is staying mobile. The _Dreamchaser_ and her base of operations moves regularly, hopping across the galaxy from one backwater planet to the next. Their current setup resides in the Ileenium system—a.k.a., Butt-frag Nowhere—on a little green planet called D’Qar.

Since D’Qar has been uninhabited for basically forever, there’s no need to be shy as they skim over the canopy looking for a clear place to land. The trees bend under the heat of their thrusters. Through the windshield, Johnny sees little critters leaping from branch to branch as they flee from the hovering spaceship.

A flare appears in the distance, arcing in flickering red over the treetops. “There they are,” Johnny says, adjusting their course to approach the flare’s source. Thank the gods that the little camp of squatters recognised the _One and Only_. Johnny isn’t sure he has the energy for another dogfight.

They fly over a last swell in the terrain. The hill falls away on the other side to reveal the source of the flare: a little makeshift landing pad surrounded by tall pines and stone ruins. The tiny, smudgy shapes of humans scurry around the landing pad. Two of them hold traffic wands, waving the _One and Only_ in for a landing. Johnny flashes the lights in acknowledgement.

The moment they land, the crew on the ground overruns the _One and Only_ , swarming onto its back to extinguish the fire that reignited on the portside wing and crawling beneath its belly to run diagnostics. As he descends the ramp, Johnny barely sees a flash of a blonde-tipped mullet disappearing down the hall towards the engineering bay.

“Donghyuck— if you’re looking for Yukhei,” he calls, “he’s in the cockpit.” Behind him, the mullet’s footsteps reverse back up the hall and climb the ramp towards the upper deck.

Johnny shakes his head and laughs to himself. _Kids._

At the bottom of the exit ramp waits a young Zabrak. He grins up at Johnny through the dark blue hair that hangs in his eyes. “Wasn’t expecting to see you,” he says, “and on fire, no less.”

Johnny reaches out to ruffle the Zabrak’s hair before he remembers that the fluffy hairstyle hides a crown of pointed horns. He redirects his hand in just enough time to pat the kid’s shoulder, instead. It looks totally casual. Totally. “Good to see you, too, Jaemin.” He jabs a thumb over his shoulder back towards the open belly of the _One and Only_. “Listen, we’ve got a passenger that needs to send a message but our comms antenna got, uh… well, it’s not working anymore.”

Jaemin waves his hand before Johnny can go any further. “Sure, sure, we’ve got a setup in the temple. Renjun can help your guy.”

He looks over his shoulder, intending to go back up into the ship to fetch Kun, but the rebel already stands a few meters behind him. He smiles, more out of surprise than anything else. Kun gives him a weird look in return before brushing past him to follow Jaemin’s directions to the temple. Maybe Johnny has something in his teeth…?

Their stopover on D’Qar proves to be a small respite. While Donghyuck, Jaemin, and Jongho help Yukhei and Chenle make repairs on the ship, Renjun shows Kun the ropes of his MacGyvered comm station. Yangyang and Ten hit it off on sight. They tag team between getting underfoot in the engineering bay, sneaking food from the kitchen while Jeno tries to cook a meal for everyone, and annoying Johnny while he tries to nap.

The temple ruins aren’t much—a lot of big rock pillars and faded murals that must have been very impressive and sacred many millennia ago—but the small band of vagrants have moved in and given it that life-on-the-lam homey touch. Someone (Jeno, Johnny suspects—he can’t imagine any of those other kids bothering to make things nice) has gone to the trouble of draping cloths on the walls, doubling as decoration and a way to warm the place up. Thick blankets line the alcoves in the wall where the crew sleeps: six perfect little inlets in the stone, one for each of them. When Johnny rolls into the biggest one for his snooze, he finds the blankets to be much softer than they look.

Maybe life as a runaway on a deserted planet wouldn’t be so bad. They’ve got cushy blankets, good food (thanks again, Jeno), and no bounty hunters pressing blasters to the backs of their necks. _That last one_ , Johnny thinks, rolling his still-sore shoulder, _is a big plus._

Kun wanders out of one of the back rooms after a while, eyes distant like his mind is a whole star system away. He sits in the adjacent bunk. One hand floats up to rub absently at his wrenched shoulder—the mirror image of Johnny’s own injury.

Johnny closes his eyes. _Don’t get involved. Don’t get involved. Don’t get involved._

He sighs. Sometimes Johnny wishes he wasn’t such a nice guy.

Saying a mental farewell to his nap, Johnny swings his legs over the side of his bunk and looks over at Kun. “Bad news from the front?”

The light coming through the windows at the top of the temple’s high, high ceiling catches the turn of Kun’s nose as he lifts his head by the slightest degree. His eyes remain far, far away. “Do you actually care?” he asks.

Johnny rubs at his eyes with the heel of his hand. “It’s hard to nap with you brooding all over the place,” he teases, tacking on a fake yawn for dramatic effect.

Kun snorts. “Well, excuse me for disturbing your rest.” He gets up to leave. Johnny grabs his elbow and tugs him right back.

“Don’t get your flight suit in a twist.” He pulls Kun down to sit next to him on the edge of the bunk. “You’ll have to tell me at some point on account of me being your intergalactic cab driver, so you may as well spill now.”

A sigh drifts out of Kun’s chest. He fiddles with a spare bit of wire in the space between his knees. His eyes stay fixed on it as he twists it in and out of abstract shapes and helices. “Everything is fine,” he says. “I reached my C.O. and he was relieved to hear from me. And then as soon as he was done being relieved, he chewed me out for wrecking my X-wing and losing an astromech.” He smiles, lopsided and self-effacing. “I expected that, though.”

Johnny leans back on his hands. “Sometimes yelling is a love language.”

Kun laughs. “Yeah,” he says, shaking his head, “that’s Doyoung.”

“So what’s with the long face?”

The thin camping mattress squeaks underneath them as Kun shifts in place. The corner of his mouth goes tight and small. “Nothing. It’s nothing. Just a bad feeling.” He stands. “Our cruiser is orbiting Crait.”

Before he thinks better of it (and isn’t that how Johnny makes most of his decisions? Before he can think better of it?), Johnny reaches out for Kun’s wrist again. He turns, frowning down at Johnny’s hand, and then at Johnny himself. Bolstering his confidence with a grin, Johnny says, “You can trust me, you know.”

A line appears between Kun’s eyebrows. “Why?”

Embarrassment ties itself in a tight knot behind the hollow of Johnny’s throat. He lets go of Kun’s wrist, withdrawing his hand behind his back like a dog retreating with its tail tucked between its legs. _Because you saved my life, you stuck up bantha-brain_. “Well,” he says, shrugging the rejection away like water off a duck’s back. “You’ve gotta trust somebody.”

Kun turns away. “I’ll be onboard.”

Johnny lets him go. Rebel types are like that, in his experience: full of themselves, too good to associate with smugglers like himself. It suits him just fine if Kun wants to be recalcitrant. Maybe he can actually get a kriffing nap before it’s time to shove off again. _Yeah_ , he thinks, flopping back onto the blankets. He’ll nap, wake up fresh as a daisy, they’ll jump over to Crait, collect their reward, run back to Nar Shaddaa to deliver the credits to Grakkus, and then Johnny will finally have that coconut on the beach. Most importantly, Kun will go back to being the Empire’s problem and Johnny will never have to deal with him again.

✩

Everything in this star destroyer is darkly-shined durasteel: durasteel floors, durasteel walls, durasteel ceiling. The ship is cold and sterile, just like the Empire it serves.

Communications Officer Han Dong doesn’t feel the cold as she hastens towards the bridge with quick, measured steps.

Nary a head turns when the doors part with a hiss. The officers on the bridge are laser-focused on their tasks, heads bowed and eyes fixed to their screens save one man, who paces the length of the bridge’s catwalk with a straight spine and his arms folded in the small of his back. General Kim Junmyeon strikes an imposing figure with his silhouette cut out against the star field seen through the destroyer’s massive windshield.

Han approaches him without hesitation. It’s a bold move—especially for a relatively low-ranking officer such as herself—but Communications Officer Han is a bold woman.

She stops and clicks her heels as she salutes. “General Kim,” she says.

The general inclines his head to acknowledge her salute. He fails to hide the spark of curiosity in his eye as he regards her. “Yes, Officer.”

“I’ve been listening to stray transmissions, keeping an ear out for anything suspicious. It’s mostly nothing, but…” Han holds up an information disc. “I picked up something you may want to hear.”

✩

It’s fine—everything’s fine. Everything is _fine_.

So why can’t Kun shake this sense of dread?

He kicks a bundle of ferns out of sheer frustration. “Kriffing smugglers. Space trash. Scoundrel.” Three more kicks, just for good measure. “Stupid, suave, know-it-all, cocky-ass—”

“Whoa, whoa.” Ten’s arrival interrupts Kun mid-assault, stopping his foot on the backswing. “Don’t take it out on the poor plants. They didn’t drag you from the back of a speeding spaceship.”

Kun shoots Ten a look that he’s pretty sure could curdle blue milk. “You’re in no place to talk,” he points out. “ _You’re_ the reason that damn bounty hunter came after us in the first place.”

Ten concedes the point with a shrug. He slinks (what is it with Twi’leks and _slinking_ all over the place? Like, we get it, you’re a sexy alien) over to a tree stump and sits down, crossing his legs. “He’s infuriating, isn’t he?”

Kun turns to the side, crossing his arms. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The Twi’lek kicks his foot, drawing lazy circles in the air with the toe of his boot. “You know,” he sing-songs. “You, Johnny, a romantic walk among the stars, sparks flying, your toes not touching the ground.”

A strange, ticklish feeling curls in the pit of Kun’s stomach. It’s not entirely pleasant. He picks at a twig growing out of the trunk of a nearby tree. “Quit making things up.”

“Please,” scoffs Ten. “The sexual tension between you two makes my lekku itch.”

The twig snaps off. Kun rolls it between his fingers. “You’re oxygen deprived. I can’t stand that man.” He can’t stand his stupid smile or his stupid eyes or his stupid laugh or his stupid muscles or the stupid way he looked when he asked Kun what was on his mind. Kun _hates_ men like Johnny: arrogant, cocky men who have no substance to back up their big talk. Men like Johnny drive Kun crazy. Johnny drives Kun crazy.

Ten laughs outright as though Kun just said the funniest thing he’s heard in a star cycle. “You don’t hate him, your little true-blue boy scout heart just can’t accept that you’ve got the hots for a dirty smuggler.”

Kun arches an eyebrow at Ten over his shoulder. “Pot, kettle, black.”

The Twi’lek pooches his lip out in an exaggerated pout. “Don’t try to moralise me when we’re having boy talk,” he complains.

“Don’t call it that,” Kun whines, wrinkling his nose. “We’re not having boy talk.”

“Yes, we are!” Ten hops to his feet and bounces over to Kun’s side. He throws his arms around Kun, hanging on despite his protests, and coos, “We’re having best friend boy talk because we’re best friends!”

Damn, this bastard is strong. Kun tries to wriggle out of his hug but it’s like trying to get free of a hungry dianoga’s tentacles. “We are _not_ best friends. I don’t even know you—”

“We are! We’re best friends!” Ten squeezes harder. Kun worries that his eyes will pop out of his skull. “Commander Qian Kun of the Alliance to Restore the Republic is best friends with a thief!”

Just when Kun is about to unleash the full force of his hand-to-hand combat training on Ten, the undergrowth crackles, hailing the approach of someone from the temple. They surely look ridiculous as they both turn in unison, still tangled up in one another.

Yukhei stumbles into the little clearing, tugging his boot free of some brambles that catch at his big feet. When his eyes land on Kun and Ten, his eyebrows reach for his hairline. “We’re just about ready to take off.” He pauses, looking back and forth between them both. “Should I, uh… You guys need a minute to finish up?”

Ten cackles right in Kun’s ear, making him wince for more reasons than one. Kun elbows him in the gut and finally gets out of his grasp. “ _No_ ,” he says firmly, passing Yukhei as he walks back towards the ship.

The echo of Ten’s laughter follows him out of the forest. It scares a flock of birds into taking flight, too.

When Kun boards the _One and Only_ , he passes Johnny on as he climbs the narrow ramp to the upper deck. Although he tries to brush past, he fatally underestimates just how broad Johnny is, and they get caught halfway up the corridor, chest to chest.

Johnny smirks, right in Kun’s face. No trace of the tenderness from earlier remains in that stupid, cocksure smile. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” he says, dripping with sleaziness. Kun rolls his eyes, moving to inch past, but Johnny’s hands catch him by the elbows. “Hurry, hurry, hurry!” he tuts. “Where’s the fire, rebel? Ship’s not going anywhere without her captain.”

Kun jerks his arms free. “Don’t call me that.”

“That’s what you are, isn’t it?” Johnny tilts his head. The smuggler only has a few inches on Kun but even that slight difference sets off all the rage alarms in Kun’s head. He catches himself puffing up his chest and trying to subtly rise onto the balls of his feet to compensate. “You’re a rebel.”

He shoves at Johnny’s chest with both hands. The latter bumps back against the wall of the ship, his smirk still firmly in place. “And you’re space junk,” spits Kun.

Johnny grabs a handful of his crotch and shakes it suggestively in Kun’s direction. “I got your space junk right here, sweetheart.”

With that, the rogue swaggers away without another word, leaving Kun behind catching flies in sheer disbelief at the audacity.

He can’t wait to get off this kriffing ship.

✩

Take off goes smoothly. Chenle’s voice comes over the intercom counting down the jump to lightspeed shortly thereafter. Once they’re in hyperspace, it’s a straight shot to where the Alliance cruiser orbits Crait—all that’s left to do is ride it out. Kun folds out one of the little bunks in hopes of finally getting some rest.

In sleep, he dreams of stars.

He wakes to Ten shaking his shoulder. “Rise and shine, boy scout,” he says. Louis peeks his little astromech head over the mattress to bleep softly at Kun. “We’re almost there.”

Kun sits up, stretches, and opens his mouth to ask a question when his stomach interrupts him with a long, rumbling growl.

Ten laughs. “You keeping a Wookiee in there?” He walks over to the galley, grabs a roll, and lobs it across the room to Kun. “You slept through dinner but I saved this for you.”

It’s just a hunk of rehydrated bread but Kun hasn’t eaten in what amounts to about two standard days. In the same amount of time, he’s wrecked a starship, broken out of jail, and ridden a freighter bareback through a dogfight. As Kun looks down at that little bread roll, he feels a little bit like he’s about to cry.

“Thanks,” he manages.

Ten waves it away. “They’re waiting for you up front.”

Kun takes the roll with him, eating it as he leaves the common room to answer his unofficial summons to the cockpit. As he passes the crew cabins, he hears Yukhei and Chenle’s laughter coming from behind the door with the life-size poster of a popular Nuna-ball droid painted in blue and yellow.

It’s just Johnny up front, relaxed in his pilot’s chair as he gazes out the windshield at the galaxy streaking past them at lightspeed. Blue light wavers over Johnny, blurring his silhouette into something sharp and moody. Kun would wish for a camera if he didn’t know that the pretty picture would be ruined the moment Johnny opened his mouth.

He sits in the co-pilot’s chair without ceremony, uncaring of how Johnny jerks in surprise in his peripheral. “You rang?”

The smuggler captain straightens in his seat, checking his controls with a glance in Kun’s direction. It’s rare that Kun sees Johnny on his back foot. _Take that, you kriffer_ , he thinks, more than a little vindictive. _See how it feels?_

“Um,” says Johnny. “Yeah. We’re almost there and I wanted you up here so you can hail your cruiser as soon as we drop out of lightspeed. I just got my ship fixed and I’d love to avoid another firefight if at all possible.”

Shoving the remainder of the roll into his mouth, Kun swivels the co-pilot’s chair around so he can put on the headset. Through a mouthful of crumbs he mumbles, “T-minus?”

“‘Bout a minute or so.” Johnny glances at him again. Kun kinda wishes he would stop doing that. It’s making him nervous. “I’m sorry I didn’t wake you up for dinner.”

Kun looks around so fast that the headset nearly whips off his head. “What?”

Johnny looks at him a third time, and gods be damned if his smile doesn’t look downright sweet in the light from the hyperspace warp. “Ten wanted to wake you but I told everyone to let you sleep.” He turns back to his controls, fiddling with one of the dials. Kun has never flown a VCX-100 before but he knows enough about flying spaceships to know that Johnny’s just looking for something to do with his hands. “Bacta’s great and all but you need some natural rest, too, to heal right. That’s what my mama always says, anyway.”

Oh, kriff. He’s a mama’s boy. He’s a mama’s boy with a heart of gold, raised right but forced to grow up before he was ready to help provide for his family on the wrong side of Corellia. He puts up a hard front because it’s the only way he knows how to hold his own in a world of gangsters and thieves. He’s a tall, rough, handsome scoundrel who has a soft spot for his mommy.

 _I’m gonna pass out,_ Kun thinks. Aloud, he says, “Thank you, that was very considerate.” Or, he _means_ to say “Thank you, that was very considerate,” but instead all that comes out is a dry sort of squeaking sound and the word, “That—”

Across from him, Johnny’s smile droops. “Look, I know we didn’t get off on the right foot or whatever, and honestly, I get it. I’m a cad, you’re better than me, blah, blah. But even war heroes need to rest every now and then.” He starts pulling the hyperdrive lever back, preparing to break once they drop out of lightspeed. “The galaxy needs you to save it, rebel. So you gotta take care of yourself.”

Kun blinks a few times. How is he supposed to react to a gesture of care and sentiment from a sleazy criminal, anyways? He turns back to the comm controls, eyes glazed over as his brain loops the sound byte of Johnny saying ‘my mama’ into infinity.

They fall silent, eyes on their own parts of the dashboard. The air between them shivers, delicate and strung tight. Kun holds his breath through it. He flinches when a proximity alarm trills, breaking the silence.

Calm as ever, Johnny flips a toggle to turn off the alarm. “Approaching our destination,” he announces, several notches below his usual volume. Kun can barely hear him over the constant, low rumble of the ship’s ambient engine noise. The hairs on Kun’s arms prickle. “Dropping out of lightspeed in five, four, three…” The captain pulls back on a lever. The ship shudders and purrs in response, front thrusters powering up to brake. Around them, the streaks of hyperspace start to grow shorter and wider as they slow down. Johnny takes the yoke in both hands, flexing his grip. “Get ready for your homecoming party.”

A tiny smile turns up Kun’s lips. He swivels his chair a degree away from Johnny. “Get ready for your payday.”

The freighter shudders as it drops out of lightspeed. Kun lurches forward and then back again in his seat with the sudden arrest of their momentum. He keys in the contact for the _Vision_ , preparing to open a link with the cruiser.

Next to him, Johnny lets out a shaky breath. “Oh no.”

Kun looks up, first at Johnny, and then following Johnny’s gaze out the windshield. What he sees there—or, rather, what he doesn’t see—makes his heart sink.

All that remains of the _Vision_ is a blasted-out shell. Electricity from the blown energy lines still arcs across the great carcass of the ship. Pieces of wreckage pollute the area as far as the eye can see, floating in slow, aimless turns like a massive synthetic asteroid field. Kun can see roasted X-wings and TIEs alike amid chunks of the big cruiser. As the _One and Only_ trundles through, a helmet bearing a Rebel insignia bumps gently against the windshield and rolls up and over the back of the ship. Behind it all looms Crait, cold and white, bearing witness to the carnage like an unfeeling eye.

A lump rises in Kun’s throat. He jams the comm button and forces himself to speak through it. “ _Vision_ , this is Cloud Leader hailing you from the _One and Only_ , do you copy?”

Static.

“ _Vision_ ,” Kun repeats, enunciating every word. He squeezes his hand into a fist. “This is Cloud Leader. I repeat, this is Cloud Leader, hailing you from the _One and Only_. Do you read me?”

“Kun,” Johnny says, his voice still quiet. Too quiet. So quiet and soft that it makes Kun angry, absolutely kriffing furious. People only talk that quiet when they pity you.

“Shut up. Pull us in closer,” Kun demands, hard as flint. He squeezes his eyes shut. “Doyoung? Jungwoo? It’s Kun. Does anybody hear me? Please,” he pleads into the headset, “ _please_ , somebody answer me.”

White noise crackles back down the line. A dry sob escapes Kun’s chest. He folds his lips between his teeth to suppress it. They’re all gone, everyone is gone. His entire squadron, all of the crew, even the junky little maintenance droids. Gone.

He sinks back in his chair, bringing his shaking hands up to cover his face. “This is my fault,” he whispers. “The comm array on D’Qar wasn’t secure, the Imperials must have intercepted my transmission. I’m so _stupid,_ I’m so, so stupid. I led them right to our doorstep and now they— and now they’re _gone_ , they’re all gone.”

Gloved fingers pry at Kun’s hands, tugging him out of his hiding place. Johnny holds his gaze steady, eyes uncommonly grave. “We don’t know that for sure,” he says. “Is there an outpost in this system?”

“Yeah… yeah.” Kun balls his hands into fists. Johnny presses his thumbs into the hollows between the bones of Kun’s wrists. “On Crait, but there’s no way. The TIEs are too fast, and their star destroyers… they wouldn’t stand a chance.”

Johnny drops Kun’s hands and turns back to the controls. “Never tell me the odds.”

He guides his freighter closer to the bombed-out shell of the _Vision_. The _One and Only_ ’s searchlights throw the dead ship into ghostly relief as they pass over its hull. It’s hard for Kun to watch but he can’t tear his eyes away. His breath stills in his throat, caught up as he waits in dread for the lights to reveal the worst. His stomach turns every time an errant piece of debris moves through the high beams. The comm fills the cockpit with white noise.

Suddenly, Johnny points at Kun. “Hail them again. Open channel, short range.”

Kun shakes his head. “It won’t work. They can’t answer, they’re—”

The pilot’s head whips around. “It’ll work.” He nods to the comm. “Do it.”

For a moment, Kun holds Johnny’s eyes, looking from one to the other. _How can you be so sure?_ he wants to ask, and _If I call again and no one answers, I won’t be able to handle it._ His lips part, hesitating on another protest.

“Kun.” Johnny’s voice is soft, strong, and leaves no room for doubt. “Trust me.”

Sighing, Kun reaches for the comm. “Crew of the _Vision_ , this is Cloud Leader aboard the _One and Only_. Do you read me?”

Another burst of static follows. Kun counts the seconds. _One… two… three…_

He has just given up when the static jumps. A halting, stuttering transmission starts to bleed into the spaces between the static’s soundwaves.

Kun sits bolt upright, fiddling with the comm’s dial for better reception. As he brings it into tune, bits and pieces of words become intelligible from the fuzz: _Cloud… read… hit… in…_ “The signal’s coming from a grounded array,” he says, still fiddling with the settings. “They… they’re on the planet. It’s the only one in the system.” Kun looks over at Johnny. The revelation hits him in a head rush. “They made it to the outpost.”

Johnny visibly lets go of a deep breath, so deep that his shoulders sag with it. He steers the ship away from the battlefield, pointing her nose towards the planet and gunning the thrusters. A weak grin quirks up one side of his mouth. “Told you so.”

He shouldn’t—it’s not the time, not the place, and they’re not out of hot water yet—but Kun’s so _kriffing_ relieved that he can’t help but laugh a little bit. “Fly closer,” he says. “We need a better signal.”

“Aye, aye, Commander.”

The doors slide open behind them. “Hey, did we— oh.” Chenle pulls up short at the sight through the windshield. After a heartbeat, he curses under his breath. “Empire.”

“There’s an outpost below,” explains Johnny. “Survivors.”

Chenle stands between the two chairs, leaning between them to get a clearer look outside the ship. “How many?”

Kun swivels back to the comm. The transmission crackles, fracturing the Alliance transmission into words and phrases. His mind races to piece them together into something coherent. _Cloud… lie… out… act…_ He groans through his teeth, frustrated. “It’s still too jumbled, I can’t tell.”

Beside him, Chenle perks up. “Oh. It’s kinda finicky, you have to—” He leans across Kun, reaching for the comm, and then hesitates. As an afterthought, he looks down at Kun. “Um, may I?”

“By all means.” Kun leans back. “It’s your ship.”

Chenle grins. Turning back to the comm, he tweaks a dial by a miniscule increment and then winds back and slams his fist down on the top of the box.

The message immediately snaps into crystal clarity. Jungwoo’s voice rings through the cockpit, reciting, “—peat, Cloud Leader, this is the Alliance outpost at Crait Base. Do you copy?” Kun cheers, actually cheers, and shakes Chenle by the shoulders so hard that his own headset falls off.

“You little kriffing genius!” he shouts. “You’re amazing!”

Chenle shoves Kun’s hands towards the comm. “Answer!” he insists, laughing a little. “Answer!”

Kun scrambles to put the headset back on and opens a secure link with the outpost. “Crait Base, this is Cloud Leader. We saw what remains of the _Vision_. Are we clear to approach the outpost for landing?”

“It’s good to hear from you, Cloud Leader.” Jungwoo really does sound relieved, even over the shitty comm. “You’re all clear.” The moment he hears the word, Johnny punches up the thrusters. The freighter rockets down towards the planet.

“It’s good to hear from you, too,” Kun replies. “What happened? How many were evacuated before the _Vision_ was destroyed.”

A few ticks of radio static lapses between them before Jungwoo answers. “We’ll brief you once you touch down. Sending you our coordinates now.”

Kun frowns. That can’t mean anything good. “Copy that, Crait Base. Over and out.”

His stomach twists itself into knots and double knots for the entire journey down to the surface. Crait’s landscape stretches out below the ship, endless salt plains as far as the eye can see, so flat that if you look at the horizon too long you can almost see it bend with the curvature of the planet. It’s flat, all flat, until all of a sudden it isn’t. The cliffs rise from nothing, standing up out of the earth at a ragged-edge right angle. The Alliance base sticks out of these cliffs like a metal growth, dusted over in salt. Thanks to the white terrain, Kun can’t even see the blood red web of trenches until their ship is practically on top of them.

Inside the hangar, Alliance personnel—mostly engineering crew, judging by their uniforms—run in zigzags between the handful of escape shuttles parked in a haphazard line along the wall opposite the blast doors. Kun counts the X-wings under his breath, skimming their hulls for their serial numbers. _Jaehyun, Miya, Seungcheol, Mingyu… Yerim… Bora…_

 _Half_. Kun grips the back of the pilot’s chair until the leather creaks in his fist. Half of Cloud Squadron. His heart breaks.

He’s halfway down the _One and Only_ ’s exit ramp before it even finishes lowering, Johnny hot on his heels. An aide—Dejun—waits for him there.

Kun grabs his shoulder and squeezes. “Dejun. Good to see you.”

“Glad to have you back, Commander.” Dejun returns Kun’s greeting with a smile that’s genuine but fried around the edges. “Lieutenant Kim sent me to fetch you.” His eyes slide past Kun to where the _One and Only_ ’s crew (plus Ten) stands on the ramp behind him. “Your friends—”

“They can wait here,” Kun interjects. “Take me to Jungwoo.”

✩

 _Ka-dunk, plop._ There’s a nice, distracting sort of rhythm to this. _Ka-dunk, plop._ Throw the ball, ball ricochets off the wall and hits the ceiling _—Ka-dunk—_ ball arcs back towards Johnny so he can catch it—p _lop._ The cycle starts over again: _Ka-dunk—_

Ten snatches the bouncy ball out of midair. “Will you cut it out? You’re making me nervous.”

Johnny slouches, sliding all the way down to the edge of his seat. “Fun sucker,” he gripes. “This is why I didn’t want you on my ship.”

The Twi’lek snorts and rolls his eyes. “I thought you didn’t want me on your ship because you thought I was going to maroon you on a deserted moon and run off with all your worldly possessions.”

According to Johnny’s watch, it’s been a standard hour since Kun left the ship. He stands up, counts the number of steps it takes to cross the cockpit, and then turns around and comes back to count the other direction. “How long do you think this briefing thing is gonna take?” He checks his watch again.

“Relax.” Ten flops down in the co-pilot’s chair as though to lead by example. “It’s only been a few minutes. And anyways, we’re in the land of boy scouts now. No one’s gonna run away with your reward money.”

Reward money. Right. Johnny had actually kind of forgotten about the reward money. Thirty thousand credits to save his neck from Grakkus the Hutt. Rubbing a hand around the base of his neck, he turns and does another lap of the room.

“It’s been over an hour,” he corrects. “I’m just— I just hope everything is okay.” He nibbles on the inside of his bottom lip. “You know, if the Empire is still poking around we might have trouble getting away and all.” He walks over to the dashboard, bracing himself against it to lean over and look down into the hangar through the windshield. The chaos that reigned at their arrival has calmed in the past hour to a mild frenzy. Teams unload the escape shuttles in waves, bringing down crates and other supplies saved from the wrecked cruiser.

Movement at the far end of the hangar catches Johnny’s eye. Kun reappears from the passage leading into the belly of the bunker, sans aide and looking uncharacteristically small—but maybe that’s just the perspective. He barely takes a few steps before a swarm of X-wing pilots, still suited up in their bright orange flight suits, flocks to him. Johnny watches them speak for a few minutes. Even from here, Johnny can read the grief and guilt in Kun’s body language, but there’s dignity and the gravitas of a real leader. This must be Kun in Commander mode.

The knot of pilots cinches tight around Kun in a big group hug. Johnny feels it like a squeeze around his heart. “D’you think everything’s okay?” he wonders aloud.

Ten stands up, joining him at the window for a look. Johnny knows the moment he catches sight of Kun because he can _feel_ the mischief start to radiate off of the Twi’lek in waves.

“Oh my gods.” A smile spreads slowly across Ten’s face. “You totally have a thing for him.”

And really, even for Ten, that’s just ridiculous. _Johnny_? And _Kun_? No. No, no, no. Inconceivable. Johnny turns away from the window. “You’re oxygen deprived.”

“That’s exactly what _he_ said! Awe, look at you two.” Ten crows. He has an odd talent of making any chair he sits in look like a throne, and as he throws himself back down into the co-pilot’s chair and crosses his legs he cuts the perfect picture of aggravating smugness. “You guys should bone. Ugh, that’s so cute, it’s like the fiery die-hard and the rebel without a cause, the audience loves it.”

“I don’t recall soliciting your matchmaking services.” Johnny tugs on his ear lobe. It’s really hot all of a sudden. “It doesn’t matter, anyways. After this, I’ll never see him again.”

“So what I’m hearing is that you admit that you think he’s cute.” Ten swings the chair around, bouncing the ball off the wall a few times himself. Johnny gives him a pointed side-eye for the hypocrisy. “You don’t even know how badly you need my matchmaking services, man. You keep sleeping with people who have guns and hold a nasty grudge.” He pauses, and then amends, “Well, actually, Kun probably falls under both of those categories. But I still think it could work. Y’all should kiss and find out. And he can try to convert you to Rebelism and you can be like—” Here, he puts on a deep, machismo impersonation of Johnny. “—‘I can’t be tamed, I belong to the stars’ or whatever. It’ll be like a holodrama.”

 _This_ is why Johnny didn’t want Ten on his ship. He never knows when to keep his nose out of shit. It’s why Ten cheated Johnny out of all that money in the first place: the Twi’lek dipped his fingers into too many pies and then when it was time to pay the piper, he was spread too thin and had to take the emergency exit. If it had been anyone else, Johnny would’ve wanted revenge. But Ten’s a little different; Johnny’s known Ten since they were both fresh and green, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed on their first job as crew aboard a freighter running a little bit more than just spice. Ten has stuck his neck out for Johnny more than a few times and even though he acts… _like that_ , Johnny would never hesitate to do the same for him.

(The fact that he considers an alien who once stabbed him in the back for thousands of credits to be one of his best friends probably says something about Johnny’s life choices. He tries not to think about it too much. That way lies existentialism and therapy sessions that he can’t afford.)

Still, being a lifelong friend doesn’t exempt Ten from being really kriffing annoying sometimes. If anything, it makes it worse.

Johnny’s about to tell Ten exactly where he can stick his holodrama when a voice echoes up the hallway from belowdecks. “Ten? …Johnny?”

For all the Twi’lek’s bluffing and teasing, he leaps to his feet the moment he hears Kun calling their names. The two speedwalk neck-in-neck as they hurry down to the exit ramp.

Kun waits for them at the base of the ramp, arms crossed over his chest and staring at the floor. His eyes move back and forth in quick little jerks, the telltale sign of a man doing some quick mental gymnastics.

“Kun,” Johnny says. His cheeks flush at how out-of-breath he sounds. That’s definitely not the ultra-cool laid back persona he usually projects. “Good news?”

“Did you ask?” Ten asks, right on Johnny’s heels. “Did they say yes? Am I in?”

Kun meets their eyes. The pinch between his brows and the hard set at the corners of his mouth forecast a storm.

“They captured Doyoung,” he says, voice low. “The Empire has our General.”

The breath punches out of Johnny’s chest. He may not be a Rebel sympathiser but he’s still got a heart. “Oh, Kun,” he begins. “I’m so sorry—”

“I’m glad.” The fire that had fled Kun’s eyes at the sight of his battalion in shreds returns in a burst, sharp and bright just the way Johnny likes it. “Because you’re going to help me get him back.”

✩

When Johnny agreed to give passage to a lost Rebel pilot, he had a tiny, tiny little inkling that something like this would happen. Complications seem inevitable when it comes to getting involved with the civil war even in the tiniest, most insignificant way. It’s why folks running _extralegal_ operations such as Johnny’s little smuggling joint do their best to steer clear of either side.

Still, a quick cab ride seemed innocent enough.

 _What a joke_ , he thinks as he stares at the holographic projection of the _ISD Elyxion_. At the very center of a rat’s nest of corridors and tunnels flashes a little red dot. That little blip is the tracker embedded in General Kim’s arm.

Johnny wishes he could say this was the first time he’d ever covertly boarded an Imperial vessel with the intent to steal one of its valuable assets, but, hey. Yo ho ho, bottle of rum, pirate’s life for me, and all that.

However, there are a few key differences between sneaking onto an old transport ship operated by droids to nab a couple crates of sansanna spice and breaking a Rebellion general out of the interrogation cells of an active star destroyer, the foremost being the multiple platoons of stormtroopers patrolling the latter.

He holds up a hand to stop Kun mid-spiel. “Sorry, sorry, just… one more time.”

Kun sighs. “I thought you said you’d done this before.”

“I have,” Johnny lies. Half-lies. An exaggeration of the truth, let’s say. “But I’m a smuggler, not a bounty hunter. I don’t usually steal people.” He glances sideways at Kun. “Uh, I mean, I don’t steal—”

“Save it.” Kun leans forward, resting both elbows on the galley table. “We approach the _Elyxion_ using whatever ‘secret technique’ you claim to have—”

Johnny waves him on, interjecting, “Yeah, yeah, we’re gonna hide in the blind spot behind their communications tower near the waste dump, it’s a thing. I’m talking about when we’re inside.”

“Right.” With a quick gesture, Kun enlarges a section of the hologram schematic. “There’s a maintenance hatch near the waste dump. You and I will spacewalk, enter the ship through the hatch, and from there…” He has the decency to look sheepish as he admits, “Navigating the decks will be mostly down to luck. We’ll have to be fast. And sneaky. And… things might get messy, especially when we reach the guard room. We’ll have to get through there to reach the cells.” He winces. “And then come all the way back.”

“Cool,” Johnny says. “So we’re winging it.”

A flush climbs the back of Kun’s neck. “We’re not _winging_ it—”

Johnny raises his hands. “No, no, winging it is good. I’m great at winging it. I’d probably be more nervous if we actually had a plan.”

“We do have a plan! I just told you my plan.” Kun pouts. His tone comes dangerously close to whining. Johnny doesn’t know whether or not he’s doing it on purpose or subconsciously but either way it is devastatingly cute.

He kriffing loves cute things. Forget the promise of doubled pay, Johnny would’ve bent over backwards and said, _Anything, darling,_ if Kun had just pouted at him like that when he asked (more like _ordered_ , really) Johnny to lend his ship and his crew for the rescue mission.

Of course, Johnny won’t say no to sixty thousand credits, either.

Up front, Chenle and Ten sit at the helm of the _One and Only_ , following the coordinates of General Kim’s tracking device, while Johnny and Kun go down to the engine bay to get outfitted with their suits—with the help of Yukhei.

“Deja vu, huh?” he says to Kun with a good-natured grin.

Kun’s face pales a shade. “You mean of the time we almost died?”

Yukhei laughs. “Oh yeah, I guess so!” Johnny catches Yukhei’s eye over Kun’s head and mouths, _Come on, man!_ Yukhei’s mouth rounds out into a little ‘o’ of understanding. He turns back to Kun with a tender smile and says, “Well, don’t worry. The chances of you dying between here and the _Elyxion_ are _way_ smaller than the chances of you dying once you’re actually on board!”

The _smack_ of Johnny’s palm hitting his forehead cracks through the room so loudly that Kun turns around, eyes wide in surprise. Johnny forces a smile. “Thanks, Yukhei. Really.”

“No problem, Cap!”

Ten’s voice comes over the intercom system. “You guys might want to get ready. We’re about to come in the _Elyxion_ ’s range. Which means, you know. Things are gonna get a little spicy.”

Right on his heels, Chenle adds something to Xuxi in Huttese (Johnny’s Huttese isn’t too shabby but once Chenle and Yukhei start talking complex ship talk he falls behind). The engineer passes Kun’s gloves to Johnny. “Gotta go co-pilot, Ten’s going on the gun,” he explains. As he jogs out of the engineering bay, he calls over his shoulder, “Force be with you!”

And then there were two.

Johnny clears his throat. Kun frowns at him.

He always looks so damn suspicious. The only time he looked at Johnny with anything but wariness or mild disdain was during their arrival to Crait. It took Kun thinking his entire fleet had been destroyed for him to trust Johnny for a handful of seconds.

Working up a polite smile (Johnny’s not used to being polite. He hopes he hasn’t overshot and gone into creepy territory), he holds up the gloves. “Can I help you?”

Kun snatches them out of Johnny’s hands. “I can manage by myself, thank you very much.”

Johnny scoffs, holding up his hands. “Hey, rebel, I’m only trying to help.”

“I told you not to call me that,” spits Kun.

And, because he’s a piece of shit, Johnny replies, “Sure, Kun,” just to see the rebel’s blood boil.

Kun growls, actually _growls_ in frustration. “Why do you have to make everything so— so _difficult_?” he huffs, turning his back.

For stars’ sake. Johnny grabs Kun’s arm and pulls him right back around again. When Kun tries to swat him away, he tugs him close by the wrists. “You know,” Johnny starts. As he rants, he starts doing up all the tricky little fastenings on Kun’s pressure suit—the ones he definitely _can’t_ manage by himself, thank you very much. “You seem to be forgetting that I am risking _my_ ship and _my_ life and the lives of _my_ crew all for your little rescue mission.”

He looks up, right into Kun’s face. Their noses brush—that perfect, cute little nose that aggravates the ever-living _hell_ out of Johnny.

“I got half a mind to jettison you out that cargo hatch and wash my hands of you entirely.”

Kun’s hands wrap around Johnny’s wrists but he doesn’t push, just holds him tight enough that the tips of his fingers go white where they dig into Johnny’s skin. His cheeks flush pink in direct inverse. “You wouldn’t.” He says it like a dare: quiet, secret, barely a breath that skates across Johnny’s jaw.

Johnny twists his fingers in the front of Kun’s suit and pulls him against his chest. “What makes you so sure?”

“Because you’re a scoundrel,” Kun murmurs. “You wouldn’t do anything if you weren’t getting paid.”

Pressing his lips to Kun’s ear, Johnny whispers, “Then why are you trembling?”

A shaky breath stirs the hair near Johnny’s ear. “I’m not.”

“You like me because I’m a scoundrel.” Johnny traces the line of Kun’s cheekbone with the tip of his nose until he can feel that trembling breath break on his own lips. “There aren’t enough scoundrels in your life.”

Kun’s tongue darts out to wet his lips. His eyes are big, and brown, and blown out the same way they were just before the battle with the Mandalorian. “I happen to like nice men.”

Johnny smirks. “Nice men.”

Those big brown eyes close with a flutter of eyelashes. “Very ni—”

Suddenly, the ship shakes, lurching at the impact of the _Elyxion_ ’s cannons. The floor of the engine bay tilts, unbalancing them both. Johnny manages to stay upright but Kun loses his footing. He nearly drags Johnny down with him by the death grip he’s got on Johnny’s wrists. Fortunately, Johnny’s center of gravity is a little sturdier and he manages to overcorrect Kun until he falls against Johnny’s chest. Another blast hits the shields and they stumble back against the wall together.

After about thirty more seconds of heavy fire, everything suddenly stops—even the engine. The lights in the engineering bay flicker out with a loud clunk. Johnny holds his breath, waiting. Kun opens his mouth to speak, struggling a little against Johnny’s hold, but Johnny shakes his head and raises a finger to his own lips.

Fifteen ticks pass before the glow of the emergency lights lifts gently, illuminating the perimeter of the room. Carefully, Johnny lets go of Kun.

“That’s our cue,” he says, keeping his voice low. “Let’s get going.”

“That’s it?” Kun is still breathless—from the fighting, this time. “We’re hidden on the ship?”

Johnny nods, retrieving their oxygen helmets from where they’d rolled across the room during the commotion. “They won’t find us unless they send TIEs looking for us. And they won’t waste TIEs on an unregistered smuggling freighter when they’ve got a Rebellion general in custody.” He pauses. “Um, can you… give me a hand?”

Both of Kun’s eyes go round as plates but when he sees Johnny gesture to the fastenings of his pressure suit that he needs help doing up, the rebel pilot looks away with red ears. His Adam’s apple bobs a few times before he works up the courage to look back at Johnny again and nod. He steps in close to fasten the tricky straps.

For the first time in Johnny’s recent memory, the engine room is completely silent save the sound of their breathing. The low emergency lights catch Kun in diffused blue-green, casting soft-edged shadows in the hollows of his cheeks and eyes. Johnny can’t help but stare. Anyone would stare if they saw Kun like this.

The time it takes Kun to finish cinching Johnny into his suit is far too short. When he backs away, his hands linger a moment of a moment longer on Johnny’s chest—like maybe he wants to be caught again, wants Johnny to reel him in and finish what they started. Oh, is it ever tempting.

Johnny holds out Kun’s oxygen helmet. He accepts it with the tips of his fingers, eyes fixed on his dim reflection in the curve of the metal.

“When we make it out of here,” Johnny says, putting on his own helmet. It clicks into place and the bottled oxygen on his back hisses as it starts to flow. “I’m getting that kiss.” He climbs into the airlock hatch without waiting for a response.

A few silent seconds follow before he hears the c _lick-hiss_ of Kun’s mask and the other man drops down into the hatch alongside him. He pulls the hatch door closed behind him and seals it. The only light in the little metal tube is a tiny chink of emergency chemiluminescence. It’s just enough to make out Kun’s shape. Johnny could’ve found him in the dark, anyways. He slips an arm around Kun’s waist, holding him close.

“Ready?” he asks.

The helmet bobs in a quick nod. “Open it.”

 _Here goes nothing._ With one quick kick, Johnny disengages the latch on the outer hatch door.

SInce the ship’s power is down, neither the airlock nor the atmo bubble are functional, so Johnny and Kun are sucked out of the hatch with a gust of air. Johnny tightens his hold on Kun, loathe to let him go lest they drift apart. If they’re going to stray off their intended course, they might as well go together.

Fortunately, Kun has good hands and even better timing, and he uses their momentum to grab hold of the maintenance hatch above the waste dump with all the ease of a professional. From there, it’s just a matter of getting inside.

The hatch has a lock on it—presumably to deter people like he and Kun (or more realistically, handsy Jawas)—but Kun whips out a fusion cutter borrowed from Yukhei and makes short work of it. It’s a quick repeat on the second hatch door inside the airlock (and here, Johnny thanks the gods that the star destroyer’s atmo bubble is far stronger than the one on the _One and Only_. Getting sucked into the vacuum of space is not on the agenda for this particular mission).

Once inside, they take a moment to hide their helmets and get their bearings. They must have gone over the _Elyxion_ schematics a hundred times between here and Crait but a refresher never hurts.

Johnny takes a deep breath through his nose. “Oh yeah,” he sighs, groaning in fake satisfaction. “Smell ‘at, Kunnie? I love the smell of Imp shit in the morning. Smells like…” He sucks in another big sniff. “Victory.”

Kun chooses to ignore him (which Johnny respects). He kneels, pulling the holo out of his pocket and activating it. General Kim’s little red dot still blips strong, right in the center. While Kun goes over the map again, Johnny takes a look around. It is—literally—the biggest pile of shit that Johnny has ever seen.

“Hey,” Johnny muses. “If your boss is being held prisoner in the _belly_ of the beast… does that make this the butt of the beast?” Kun shakes his head but still doesn’t grace him with a response, so he keeps pushing. “Furthermore… if we’re entering through the beast’s butt to retrieve something from its belly… does that make us, like, the beast’s colonoscopy?”

That one coaxes a soft, huffing laugh out of the rebel. _Success_. Kun straightens, pocketing the holo again and shoving Johnny’s arm as he walks past. “This way.”

Even though they keep having to stop periodically to double check the map (Kun is either terrible with directions or just more nervous than he’s letting on), navigating the star destroyer is pretty straightforward. Turns out the Empire extends their love of order to their battleship designs. They have several close calls with the patrolling bucketheads but nothing a little bit of quick footwork or hiding in a nearby supply closet can’t fix. Stormtroopers have terrible peripherals.

The guard room poses a little more of a problem. They hide around the corner from the big door, assessing the last obstacle that stands between them and the captive General. From what they can piece together between glimpses through the doors when someone comes in or out, there are at least five Imps with one officer on duty at the controls.

Johnny ducks back around the corner, hiding from the view of the trooper leaving the detention block.

“Well?” demands Kun.

He shakes his head. “There’s no way, man. We’d be swiss kriffin’ cheese the moment we set foot in there.”

A stubbornness sets Kun’s jaw in a hard line. “There’s a way. There’s always a way. You’re _you_ , you always have a plan or an idea or a— a crazy scheme or _something_. It’s why I brought you along in the first place.” His eyes bore into Johnny’s with an intensity that’s hard to meet. Guilt bubbles up behind Johnny’s sternum. “I’m trusting you here, so… Work your magic, smuggler.”

Johnny shakes his head. “Part of being a smuggler is knowing when to cut your losses and run.”

The stubbornness flash-freezes into anger. “But we made it all the way here!”

“Yeah, and we’ve been damn lucky.” Johnny jabs one thumb over his shoulder towards the detention block door. “If we go in there, no amount of _luck_ will matter.”

The fire in Kun’s eyes crushes down, compacting into a tight, hot little coal of fury. “What about your money?” he spits. “If we leave this place without Doyoung, you won’t see a cent of your sixty thousand credits.”

“This job isn’t worth a _hundred_ thousand credits!” The words burst out of Johnny in an exasperated rush. “Can you hang up your preconception of me as this morally bereft scumbag for a few minutes and see sense? The only reason I agreed to go with you on this suicide mission is because I got a soft spot for you since you saved my life.” He waves his hand in an all-encompassing motion. “Money is money, whatever. I can find more money but I can’t replace your life.”

Kun’s expression softens a fraction. Maybe if the situation were different, he would’ve found the time to be touched by Johnny’s little monologue. Alas—the moment shatters when a lone stormtrooper rounds the very corner they’re hiding behind. The trooper draws up short, just as surprised to see Johnny and Kun as they are to see him. For a moment, everyone freezes in place, staring at one another.

Johnny reaches for his blaster but a shot goes off before it even leaves its holster. The stormtrooper falls to the ground in a heap of white plastoid. His eyebrows raise.

“Damn, rebel,” he says. “If all your guys shoot like that, you’ll win the war in no time.”

Kun moves, grabbing the trooper by the armpits. “Shut up and help me.” Johnny shuffles over to collect the legs and follows the jerk of Kun’s chin. “The closet,” he grunts, waddling under the weight of the stormtrooper.

They cram into the utility closet along with their dead cargo and just stare at him for a long moment, panting. Kun looks up at him with a manic gleam in his eye.

“I have a plan,” he says, breathless and grinning.

Johnny has a bad feeling about this.

✩

“Just for the record,” Johnny mutters, tugging resentfully against Kun’s vice grip on his arm, “I hate this plan.”

“Noted,” Kun acknowledges. His voice sounds creepy through the stormtrooper helmet.

A shiver goes up Johnny’s spine. “Don’t get too into character,” he says. “I’m not into that kind of roleplay.”

The business end of Kun’s stolen blaster pokes Johnny in the small of his back. “We’re literally waltzing into a death trap and you’re still making jokes.”

Johnny laughs a little despite himself. “And you still think they’re funny.”

A telling silence follows. Before Johnny can tease him any further, Kun jabs the button to open the guard room door.

Turns out he’d underestimated the number of guards stationed within by a margin of two or three. He doesn’t see any stormtroopers on duty, though, which means that if their plan fails and they do get into a firefight, the chances of them getting buried under a wave of bucketheads before they can retreat are slim. It should be a relief but sweat prickles under Johnny’s armpits at the sight of all those armed Imperials. Somehow they’re more intimidating when you can see their faces. Probably something to do with the fact that standard stormtroopers kind of look like they wouldn’t be able to get up if you pushed them onto their back.

Their entrance goes mostly ignored by most of the staffed officers but the supervising officer looks up from the puzzle cube in his lap and frowns. He starts to sit up but when he sees Kun, he relaxes again, putting his feet back up on the console. His unbothered nature does nothing to alleviate Johnny’s anxiety over potentially being discovered and subsequently shot.

“What?” the supervisor demands in a short clip. “Who the hell that?”

“New arrival,” Kun says. Short, sweet. Johnny respects that.

The supervisor narrows his eyes. “I wasn’t notified of any new arrivals.” Johnny’s heart leaps in his throat. This is it. They’ve been caught. They’re gonna die. Oh, kriff. Johnny’s too young to die. Kun’s hand tightens on his arm in silent warning. _Wait. Don’t blow our cover yet._ _Wait…_

Heaving a massively put-out, passive-aggressive sigh, the supervising officer slams his puzzle cube down on the console and gets out of his chair to hit some buttons. “You guys are supposed to tell me, you know, it’s not as easy as just wham, bam, thank you ma’am,” he complains. “There’s paperwork I have to do, arrangements that have to be made…” He throws a dirty look at them over his shoulder. “Who’s your commanding officer? Is it Nine-two-oh-eight?”

Kun nods. “Yes, sir.”

The officer rolls his eyes. “Ugh, I knew it.” He pushes a button and the door on the other side of the room slides open. “Toss him in cell two. There’s another guy in there but _unfortunately_ ,” he cuts his eyes over to Kun pointedly, “that’s the best I can do for now since I didn’t get any warning.”

“Yes, sir,” Kun says again. He pushes Johnny in front of him, heading for the door as quickly as he can without looking suspicious. “Thank you, sir.”

Good gods. How has the Empire not fallen apart with this kind of internal management? “That was easy,” Johnny mutters as the door closes behind them.

“Shh.” Kun keeps up the pace, driving them down the short row of cells. His head whips back and forth, checking each one as they pass for signs of the Rebel general. “There are security cameras everywhere. They could still be listening.”

“Cell two,” Johnny suggests under his breath, pointing discreetly with his chin at the cell towards the far end of the row. “He said there was already an occupant.”

They hurry down to the end of the row. Kun sets such a quick pace that he keeps nearly clipping Johnny’s heels as he pushes the captain from behind, still frogmarching him with the blaster at his back. Johnny’s not sure if Kun’s just forgotten or if he gets a sick kind of satisfaction out of holding him at gunpoint.

They stop at cell two. Through the chinks in the cell door, Johnny gets an impression of the occupant huddled in a little lump in the corner of the single prison bunk. Anxiety spikes in his chest. Are they too late?

Kun jams the button to open the door in such a rush that he misses the first two times. Finally, it opens, and they both cram inside. “Doyoung,” Kun breathes, dropping Johnny’s arms—and all pretenses of their cover—to shed his helmet. He hurries over to the prisoner’s side, sitting on the bunk and gingerly drawing him into his arms. The man’s face is badly bruised. A cut above his brow bone oozes a sluggish but steady drip of blood. “Doyoung, it’s Kun. You with me?”

The prisoner’s eyes open with a monumental effort. Pain hazes his gaze but there’s a spark of recognition there, too, as he looks up into Kun’s face. “Kun? You’re… alive?” His hand floats up to touch Kun’s cheek as though he needs to be sure he isn’t seeing a ghost. “What are you doing here?”

“What, you thought I was gonna let you break out of an Imperial star destroyer all by yourself and hog all the glory?” Kun smiles, all soft and gooey around the edges. “Fat chance. I’m tryin’ to get promoted.”

Johnny clears his throat to interrupt the little love-fest going on right under his nose. “I don’t know if you two forgot,” he says, laying his Corellian drawl on thick. “But we’re currently in the middle of an Imperial star destroyer and there’s CCTV, like—” He points at the camera in the corner of the cell. “Everywhere. So, if we could move this touching little reunion to the ship, that’d be—”

Before he can finish his sentence, alarms start to blare. _Security alert,_ it announces in monotone. _Breach in detention block A. Security alert._ The cell doors shut, triggered automatically by the alarm, and it’s nothing short of a miracle that Johnny reacts fast enough to jam theirs open by wedging Kun’s big stormtrooper blaster between the sill and the door. “Okay, let’s _move_!” he shouts, grabbing his own blaster and windmilling his arm to shepherd Kun and the general out of the cell.

Good gods, it was bad enough having one Rebel to babysit. Now he’s got two and one of them can barely carry his own weight—literally, physically. Whatever happened to Doyoung between the Crait system and here, it rendered him unable to stand without support for more than a few seconds at a time. Kun has to halfway carry him into the hall.

Johnny only sets half a foot outside the cell before a rain of blaster bullets comes down the hall. He presses himself back against the wall, taking cover with Kun and General Kim in the alcove of the cell door. “Kriffing, shit!” he curses. “A’right! Things are getting fun, now!” He leans out, returning a few shots down the hall. By his feet, Kun sits on the floor with General Kim still halfway in his lap. He left his own blaster in the utility closet when he changed into the stormtrooper armor, choosing to carry the fusion cutter in the armor’s holster instead, and the borrowed gun he’d carried in is currently being crunched beyond repair in the cell door. That leaves Johnny to provide all the cover fire.

He ducks back behind the meager cover again. “Kun,” he shouts over the plasma bolts scorching the metal all around them. “Go, I’ll cover you.”

“I can’t.” Kun shakes his head. “There’s no way I can carry him and use the fusion cutter at the same time, we’ll be too slow.”

“I’ll get him.” Johnny reaches down to grab Kun’s hand and help him to his feet. “Just go.” He peers around the edge of the alcove. Kriffing stormtroopers. “I’m gonna count you down. Three, two, one—” He whirls his gun around and unleashes a volley of blaster bullets while Kun, ducking low, hurries across the corridor and kneels in front of one of the grates set at intervals in the wall, cutting it open with his tool. A loud clang rings through the air, audible even over the gunfire, as the grate comes loose and falls onto the metal floor.

Kun turns around and gestures towards Johnny. “Pass him to me.”

“I said I got him, now _go_!”

Doubt shows itself in the way Kun’s eyes flicker from Johnny down to where Doyoung cowers close to the wall away from the crossfire. A stray plasma bolt hits the wall near Kun’s head and he flinches before giving General Kim one last glance and then slipping down the shaft.

Johnny twists back behind cover and picks up General Kim’s arm to loop it around his neck. “Sorry there ain’t more time for us to get acquainted, General Kim,” he grunts, lifting the man to his feet. “But you’re just gonna have to take my word for it that I’m a good guy.”

The general snorts. “Please, call me Doyoung,” he says drily. Johnny decides he likes this Doyoung guy. He respects a man with a good sense of humor under fire.

He stands, blaster at the ready, and counts down to three before bursting out from behind their cover.

It would’ve been too much to expect them both to get out of there unscathed. Doyoung looks pretty small and skinny but in reality he’s kind of a heavy guy—any fully grown man is pretty heavy, really—and it’s, like, twelve against two but Johnny’s the only one with a blaster. Saying the odds are stacked against them is the understatement of the millennium. So, really, Johnny actually kinda expects to get shot.

The shot itself was headed for Doyoung and it’s only by virtue of Johnny’s reflexes that he manages to shield the general with his body and take the hit instead. It glances off his side, searing right through his pressure suit (which is a real bitch, because those things are expensive). He groans and uses the rush of adrenaline to bodily haul Doyoung the last few steps over to the open grate and push him inside. As soon as he’s certain the general made it down, Johnny fires one last shot down the hall and then jumps down after them.

He falls into a pool of what can only be described as _sludge_. It’s thin enough to catch his fall without busting his spine but still too viscous to be clean water. Not to mention, of course, the stench.

“Qian!” Johnny yells, spluttering as he splashes about looking for a foothold. “This is a kriffing trash compactor!”

Kun shushes him fiercely from where he hunches over a control pad near the door with his handy-dandy fusion cutter. His once-shiny white armor is streaked with filth. “This is all part of the plan, remember?”

Johnny finally gets his feet and sloshes over to where Doyoung is just barely holding his chin above the waterline. He helps the poor guy up, groaning as white-hot heat radiates from his blaster wound. “You said we’d be using a _maintenance shaft,_ not a kriffing garbage chute!”

“Are you okay?” asks Doyoung.

He shakes his head. “I’m fine. I’d be better if I wasn’t swimming in refuse.”

“Quit whining,” Kun snaps. “I’m almost done.”

Using the wall of the compactor for support, Johnny picks his way over to the door with Doyoung hanging off his good side. It hurts like a motherkriffer. Dark spots crowd the edges of his vision. He takes measured breaths and focuses on not losing his feet. “We’ll have to be fast. The stormtroopers will be able to track our scent from three decks away now.”

The door opens, edges still glowing from Kun’s fusion cutter. He hurries over, takes Doyoung from Johnny, and leads the way out into the corridor. Johnny takes the brief moment of solitude to take another deep, bracing breath before he follows, blaster at the ready.

Retracing their steps back to the waste dump is slow going. Even though the garbage chute dumped them out fairly close, Doyoung’s condition restricts their pace. They also have to be extra cautious now that the entire destroyer is on high alert and searching for the intruders who kidnapped the Alliance general. The longer it takes to reach their destination, the heavier the dread weighs in Johnny’s stomach.

He’s losing blood, fast, and the more they duck and hide and run around, the worse it gets. He has a hand pressed to his side to stem the flow but there’s only so much he can do without medical supplies. They don’t have the time for him to stop and assess the wound to see what he could do to improvise. It’s not all downsides, though; the more blood he loses, the less he feels the pain.

Johnny’s mom always says optimism is his greatest strength. That optimism faces its greatest test when Kun opens the door to the waste dump to reveal dozens of stormtroopers lining the catwalks above the giant room—the giant room that they have to cross in order to reach the airlock with their oxygen helmets and their getaway ship waiting on the other side. Even Johnny’s optimistic knees go weak at the mere sight of it.

“How did they know?” he asks, voice weak with disbelief.

Kun shakes his head, pulling Doyoung back around the corner of the door out of view. He motions at Johnny. “His pressure suit and helmet, from your pack.”

Calling the jerry-rigged climate controlled sleeping bag meant for camping in sub-zero temperatures a ‘pressure suit’ is generous as best but Johnny doesn’t quibble over the point. He shrugs the pack off his shoulders and passes it to Kun, who quickly fixes the helmet over Doyoung’s head and zips him into the sleeping back like a giant sweet potato wrapped in tin foil. “We’ll just have to carry him and make a run for it.” He glances up at Johnny. “You’re stronger than me, can you manage…?”

Johnny stumbles a step back and braces his back against the wall so he can control his slide down to the floor. He laughs a little bit. “No.”

Kun looks around at him, eyebrows furrowed. “What?”

“I’ve been trying to tell you, Kun,” Doyoung says in a solemn tone. “He got shot. He took a bolt for me after you went down the chute.”

All of the color drains from Kun’s face. “What?” He shifts, propping Doyoung up against the wall so he can pull Johnny’s blood-stained hand away from his wound. He bites his lip at the sight and replaces Johnny’s hand with two of his own. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Johnny shrugs one shoulder. “I’m fine, Kun, really.” He pushes at Kun’s shoulder, trying to deter his fussing. “Take Doyoung and go.”

“Go?” Kun’s eyes flash in anger. He gives Johnny the same death-glare he’d pinned him with when they were clinging to the _One and Only_ telling Johnny _Don’t you dare give up_. Up close like this, it’s easier to see that it’s anger, yeah, but it’s a lot of fear, too. “I’m not leaving you.”

“You have to. I can’t run like this. And my suit’s wrecked, so even if I did…” Johnny puts on his most reassuring smile. “The galaxy needs the two of you a hell of a lot more than it needs me, yeah?”

Fear overtakes the anger in Kun’s expression as he looks from Johnny’s blood seeping through his fingers, to Doyoung, to the door and the death trap on the other side, and then come to settle on Johnny’s face. A heartbeat passes, and then two, and then something shifts. Determination—and maybe just a touch of mania—turns Kun’s gaze to steel.

“I’ll carry you.”

With that, he turns back to Johnny’s pack and starts rummaging around inside. Johnny blinks, stunned. “Kun, you can’t— You said yourself, you can barely carry Doyoung. There’s no way—”

“It’ll work,” Kun says. “Trust me.” He turns around, coming out of the pack with a roll of spacer’s tape. He tears a strip off with his teeth and uses it to cover the bloody tear where the plasma bolt scorched through Johnny’s suit.

Johnny looks down at the shiny tape. As far as barriers between him and the vacuum of space, it seems pretty flimsy. “Spacer’s tape? Really?”

Kun shrugs one shoulder, tossing the tape and the fusion cutter back into the pack and slinging it onto his back. “If it’s good enough for the _One and Only_ , it oughta be good enough for her captain, too.” He comes back to Johnny’s side, tips Johnny’s head towards him to look him right in the eyes. “Remember,” he says, a hint of a smile playing around his lips. “I still owe you that kiss. But we gotta make it outta here first, Cap.”

And with that, he takes Johnny’s blaster, grabs Doyoung, and disappears through the door.

Johnny recalls those gods he recently decided to believe in and hastily fashions something like a prayer: _Please,_ he thinks with as much fervor as he can muster. _Let that stupid rebel get out of here alive._

He listens to the blaster shots on the other side of the wall. Stormtroopers will just keep shooting as long as there’s something to be shot at so Johnny figures that as long as the blasters are still going off, Kun must still be alive.

The blasters peter out into silence. Johnny holds his breath, straining his ears for any sound from the adjacent room. After a long pause—long enough for Johnny to run out of air and have to take another breath—a voice, faint through the thick walls, shouts, “They’re gone!”

A sigh of relief leaves Johnny’s chest in a rush. Thank the kriffing stars. He might have to set up a shrine or something on the ship for these new gods of his.

Well, that is, if he lives long enough to ever _see_ his ship again, which is looking less and less likely by the minute.

He shifts, getting more comfortable on the durasteel floor. The cold seeps into his clothes, still wet from his tumble into the garbage compactor. He tries to think of worse places to die, just for fun.

Johnny has just come to the conclusion that there aren’t many worse than ‘on an Imperial star destroyer in a puddle of trash juice’ when the shooting in the waste dump starts back up again without warning. He groans, dropping his head back against the wall. _Why? Why did he get stuck with a Rebel hero?_ Now they’re both dead for sure.

When Kun reappears, still wearing his oxygen helmet and breathing hard from running, Johnny makes sure to tell him, “You would be a terrible smuggler.”

“Yeah?” Kun kneels next to him, hooking Johnny’s arm around his neck. “Well, you make a pretty good Rebel… for a scoundrel.”

Johnny laughs, clenching his teeth when his side twinges in protest. “You take that back.”

If he looks from the corner of his eye, he can see Kun’s smile through his helmet’s visor. “Never.”

Chaos reigns on the other side of the door. Near the airlock kneels Ten, one eye squeezed shut as he picks off stormtroopers on the catwalks. As Kun and Johnny hobble through the door, Yukhei appears and sweeps Johnny entirely off his feet into both arms like a damn princess and starts running across the waste dump like a madman. Kun follows on their heels the entire way, providing cover fire. It’s a little emasculating to be carried like a baby by a man four years his junior, sure—but mostly it’s damn impressive.

The moment Yukhei reaches the airlock, he crams the helmet onto Johnny’s head and stuffs him into the tube. He points at the end of the hatch. “Just crawl right through.”

Sure enough, the _One and Only_ is hovering on the other end of the star destroyer’s airlock with its own hatch wide open and waiting for him. It's close enough that the two atmo bubbles have merged—which explains how Ten and Yukhei boarded without suits.

Johnny doesn’t waste time being impressed. He crawls as fast as he can manage, pulling himself mostly with one hand and mostly using his feet for leverage. Yukhei, Ten, and then Kun crowd into the airlock right on his heels.

Doyoung waits on the _One and Only_ ’s engineering bay floor to help pull Johnny up with whatever little upper body strength he has to offer (they’re about par for the course on that one but Johnny appreciates the gesture). The moment he’s clear of the airlock door, Johnny collapses on the floor on his back.

Yukhei climbs out a moment later and immediately sprints out of the engine bay, no doubt making a beeline for the cockpit. A second later, he registers the sound of the bottom hatch being closed and Ten hollers at the top of his lungs, “Punch it, Lele!”

If there’s anything Chenle’s good at, it’s _speed_. Johnny slides across the metal floor as his little freighter shoots off like a bottle rocket. The moment they’re out of tracking range, Chenle will throw the ship into lightspeed. Once they go superluminal, they’re home free.

The _One and Only_ hums underneath Johnny’s hands. He tries to think of a better place to die and can’t come up with a single one.

Kun’s face enters his field of vision. He smiles gently. “Told you so.”

Dying, Johnny figures, can wait another day.

✩

After Chenle and Yukhei hop a couple of systems over with a short lightspeed jump and deem the _One and Only_ all clear of Imperial pursuers, Kun and Ten set about taking care of Doyoung and Johnny respectively—starting with all three of them taking a quick trip to the ‘fresher to wash off the trash compactor smell.

Med supplies are a bit scarce on the _One and Only_ , especially after using up half the bacta patches after their run-in with the Mandalorian bounty hunter (stars, that feels like a lifetime ago) but Kun is a freedom fighter and Ten is a thief—they know how to make do with the bare minimum. Yukhei and Chenle graciously allow Kun to nurse Doyoung’s wounds on one of the bunks in their shared cabin while Ten helps Johnny limp off to the captain’s room.

While Kun works, he gets as much information as he can from Doyoung before the drowsiness from the light painkiller sets in. Apparently, the majority of his wounds are from the battle—he refused to let the Imperial soldiers take him away from the _Vision_ quietly. _That’s just like Doyoung_ , Kun thinks, smiling where the man in question can’t see him. _He never does anything he doesn’t want to do without pitching a fit first._

Some of the cuts and bruises, however, have more sinister origins. “They wanted me to talk,” Doyoung explains. “At first I thought they wanted to know where the Crait Base was and I couldn’t figure out why they cared so much about an outpost on an uninhabited planet. Then I realised—they’re looking for the Alliance headquarters.”

Kun purses his lips. “Do you have any idea of what they have planned?”

Doyoung snorts. “No. But can it be anything good?”

And really, it’s the Empire, so there’s no arguing with that. “When we get back, I’ll report to Acting General Song so she can get a message out to Base One and let them know that the Empire has their nose to the ground.” Kun puts the finishing touches on Doyoung’s dressing and helps him slowly lower down to the mattress. “In the meantime, you should get some rest. Once we get to Crait, we’ll pop you right into a bacta tank and you’ll be up and at ‘em in no time.”

Doyoung’s eyes are already drooping before Kun reaches the end of his sentence. He raises a weak thumbs up and then sighs so deeply that Kun swears he can see Doyoung’s body sink deeper into the mattress pad.

He returns to the common area and settles down at the galley table. As he packs away the first aid kit, he takes inventory and makes note of things they’ll need to restock as he goes out of habit. _Not your ship_ , the voice of reason whispers. _The next time you step off will be the last time you see this freighter._

Good. That’s for the best, Kun tells himself. This ship brings him nothing but trouble.

The door opens and Ten enters, still shaking water off his hands. “I swear,” he complains, crossing the room to join Kun at the galley table. “That man is whinier than a youngling. You’d think I was torturing him, not trying to make him better.”

Kun closes the first aid kit. “Who, Johnny?” Heat pricks the skin of his cheeks as his brain brings up a vivid memory of applying a bacta patch to Johnny’s shoulder. “He was fine when I did it.”

Ten raises his eyebrows at Kun in a dry expression. “You know what I have to say about that.”

The flush burns brighter. “Shut up,” Kun mumbles. “It’s not like that.” He picks at the big red plus sign sticker on the back of the first aid kit. “Besides, it doesn’t matter. Soon we’ll be back at the base. Johnny will get his reward and fly off to spend it all on the tables at Canto Bight.”

Ten snorts. “Assuming he has any money left.”

“What do you mean?”

Kun only has half of Ten’s attention now; the other half has been stolen away by Leon the Loth-cat, who is twining around the Twi’lek’s ankles under the table. “Johnny owes Grakkus the Hutt some money. A lot of money. I’m sure that’s the only reason he took this job in the first place. Escorting a Rebel and a thief wanted by the Nagai crime syndicate? That’s just asking for trouble,” Ten explains. “I’m surprised we didn’t get more bounty hunters after us, honestly.”

Kun blinks. “Who?”

The Twi’lek waves his hand. “He’s, like, a gangster. It doesn’t really matter. But Chenle told me Grakkus threatened to throw Johnny and the whole crew into the gladiator pits if he didn’t repay the debt plus interest. Thirty thousand credits exactly.” Ten shrugs. He starts a game of keepaway with the ends of his bootlaces and Leon the Loth-cat. “That money’s going directly into the Hutt’s purse as soon as he can make the jump back to Nar Shaddaa.”

“But I doubled his money for the rescue job,” Kun points out. “Surely that will go towards recreation.”

“Don’t be so sure.” Ten scoots out of his seat entirely, sitting on the floor so Leon can crawl into his lap and bat at his lekku with soft paws. “After the cost of fuel, repairs, compensating the kids on D’Qar, paying Chenle and Yukhei… He’ll be lucky if he has enough left over to buy a hot meal and tip his waitress.” He laughs a little, shaking his head. “Really, he’s coming out at a loss, if you think about it, because now he’s got a big fat Imperial target painted on the back of his ship.”

Guilt rises in the back of Kun’s throat. He swallows to push it down but it comes right back up again. “Oh.” For some reason, his heart suddenly feels vulnerable in his chest. He crosses his arms over it. “Johnny is a good man.”

Ten responds with a thoughtful hum. “Yeah,” he agrees lightly. “He’s alright.”

A few minutes pass in quiet. Kun watches Ten and Leon play on the floor but his head is elsewhere: a system or two away on an Imperial star destroyer, or maybe just a few doors down the hall of this very spaceship. In his mind’s eye, Kun sees Johnny’s out-of-focus smile as he pushes Kun away with hands stained by his own blood—blood he shed taking a bolt for a man he hardly knew. _The galaxy needs the two of you a hell of a lot more than it needs me_ , he’d said. Kun looks out the ship’s window at the galaxy in question and thinks that the galaxy has plenty of rebels. What it really needs is more good men.

✩

Some things in life get better with repetition. The more times you do it, the better the experience gets. Sex, for example, and riding a bike. Eating spicy food. Playing instruments. Cooking. Sports.

Getting shot does not fall into this category. Johnny has been shot many times, and it never gets any less painful.

It would probably be easier to bear the pain if Johnny had allowed Ten to give him some painkillers but he’d refused them. He knows the ship’s medical supply is low and Johnny would rather give the good stuff to Doyoung and Kun. Like he said, he’s been shot before—he can handle it.

Well, theoretically he can handle it. Right now, he’s stuck sitting on the edge of his cabin’s desk, trying to catch his breath after attempt number four at putting his shirt on. Every time he raises his arms to pull the thing over his head, the movement of his right arm pulls the muscles in his injured side and he has to stop.

He just needs a little breather. Yeah, a quick little breather and then he’ll get dressed and go resume command of his ship. A quick little breather, and maybe a very, very short cat nap—just closing his eyes for a second, really—to recharge a bit before he tries putting his shirt on again.

A knock at the door makes him lift his head. He groans. “I told you, I’m fine, Ten. I’m a grown man, I don’t need help putting bacta on my gunshot wound.”

“Um,” the knocker calls through the door. “It’s Kun.”

Johnny blinks. “Oh, uh…” He looks down at the shirt wadded up in his hands, considers trying to slip it on again for about two seconds, and then abandons that idea in favor of draping the thing over his shoulder in a half-assed attempt at modesty. “Door’s open.”

The portal slides open a moment later, revealing Kun on the other side. He looks much smaller without the stormtrooper armor on. Someone has also lent him a change of clean clothes; probably Chenle, judging by how tightly the trousers fit. His hair is fluffy and his skin is bright, too, fresh and clean from his shower. All in all, he looks like he smells really, really good and Johnny is super into it.

“Hi,” he says. He kinda feels like he just got bonked over the head with a sledgehammer.

A small smile quirks up one side of Kun’s mouth. “Hi.”

“Hi,” Johnny says again, like a total kriffing nerf-herder.

Kun just smiles wider and steps across the threshold into the room. The door closes behind him with a soft swish. “I came to check on you.” He takes the handful of paces to come to Johnny’s side slowly, like he wants to give Johnny plenty of time to flee. Johnny doesn’t want to flee, even though he thinks he probably ought to. “How are you feeling?”

“Like I got shot.” A pang of guilt shoots through Johnny’s stomach when Kun’s eyes flicker down to the bandage on his side at his words. The rebel’s brows knit together in worry and Johnny quickly amends, “I’ll be fine.

Still, Kun sighs. “I’m sorry.”

“No, no.” Johnny dismisses the apology with a shrug and a smile. “There’s nothing to be sorry for.”

“You risked your life to protect him.” Kun draws a step closer, just a hair too close to be entirely casual. The breath catches in Johnny’s throat. It takes actual effort to force it in and out at a normal tempo. “And don’t try to pretend like you did it for money. I know you don’t actually care about all that.”

“Well,” he counters. “You’ve saved my life twice over the past twenty four hours, so if we’re keeping track…” Kun finally looks up at him and Johnny shows him a little smile. “Technically I still owe you one.”

For a moment, Kun’s eyes flit back and forth between each of Johnny’s. He gets the distinct impression that Kun would very much like to split Johnny open and read him like a starship manual. Then Kun gestures towards the bandage and asks, “Do you mind if I look at it?”

Surprised, Johnny shakes his head without thinking twice and leans back. Kun moves Johnny’s shirt out of the way, places it on the desktop, and gingerly peels back the adhesive edge of the bandage to examine the blaster burn with dark, serious eyes. While Kun’s attention is on his wound, Johnny examines his face. He takes special care to memorise the exact placement of the pretty little mole under the rebel’s eyebrow.

The cabin is silent save the sound of their breaths in the close space between them. Every inch of Johnny’s skin feels electrified.

The muscles in his stomach jump as Kun’s fingers dance around the edges of the blaster burn. Kun looks up from the wound to meet Johnny’s eyes through his lashes. His touch is light but his gaze is heavy. His lips—pretty, pretty red lips—part. The hand on Johnny’s side flattens out to a full palm, smoothing the edge of his bandage back down. It takes a low, sweeping path across his stomach and comes to rest where Johnny’s navel is framed in the crook between Kun’s thumb and forefinger.

This is when Johnny gives in.

Later he’ll realise how appropriate it is that he and Kun fall together in the same way a ship makes the jump to hyperspace: when you first throw the lever and time onboard goes soupy as the thrusters punch up, the steady stars slowly, slowly lengthening and then breaking away at lightspeed all at once, fast enough to leave your stomach behind when the hyperdrive fires and the ship jerks into hyperspace, fast enough to take your breath away.

Kun takes his breath away in the exact same way. Johnny reaches up, cups the base of Kun’s skull, and brings him down to finally, finally kiss those lips he’s been admiring since the first time the rebel pointed a blaster at his balls. Kun gives back twice as good as he gets, moving into the space between Johnny’s legs and bracing himself against Johnny’s chest with both hands. His palms burn Johnny’s skin at every point they touch. Johnny likes it. He likes it a lot.

He wants more.

He stands fully, pushing off of the desk. As he rises, he slips both hands down to Kun’s thighs (Kun’s _thighs_ , if Johnny had slept long enough to dream in the past couple of days, those dreams surely would’ve been about this man’s thighs), drawing them up and around his hips to encourage Kun to let Johnny hold him. Gods, Johnny wants to hold Kun.

Fortunately, Kun gets the message. He links both arms around Johnny’s shoulders, stubbornly refusing to stop kissing him as Johnny lifts him off the floor. Johnny takes a halting step towards the bed and nearly overbalances. He adjusts his grip—one arm supporting Kun’s ass and the other one around his back, hand splayed over the bump of his spine—and decides he likes it better this way, anyways; he likes having Kun wrapped up like this, close to him with nowhere else to go, nowhere else he has to be. Kun likes it, too, if the soft little sound he makes into Johnny’s mouth is anything to go by.

Those beautiful, blessed thighs squeeze once around his waist. Johnny takes the two-and-a-half strides across his cabin to his bunk—mostly gracefully—lowers Kun to the mattress, and climbs over him. He sits back on his heels for a moment so as not to waste the vision of Commander Qian Kun lying on his bed, bracketed between his knees.

Kun looks flushed already, his cheeks turning rosy to match the red of his lips, and his hair falls messily across his forehead. A blush crawls up the length of his throat, too, which he tilts his head back to show off when he notices Johnny looking. The blotchy pink spreads down past his collarbones, dusting the little vee of Kun’s chest revealed by his open collar and disappearing somewhere below the buttons of his shirt. His arms fell to either side of his head when Johnny set him down and his hands are in relaxed curls on the sheets above his head. He’s breathless already, nearly as breathless as Johnny himself even though they’re just getting started.

Yeah. That’ll get him through some long, lonely nights in deep space.

Kun must not realise that the sight of him alone could sustain Johnny’s libido for days with proper rationing. His fingers start to walk up the plane of Johnny’s stomach, slipping over the definition of his abs. Johnny flexes and Kun laughs at him, soft and a little bit sexy. “Show off.”

“Just for you.” Johnny lifts his left arm and does a cheesy gun show to make him laugh again, because Kun laughing at him is quickly becoming Johnny’s favorite sound in the galaxy. “Bet you didn’t know there would be heavy artillery at this blaster show.” He goes to flex the other arm and winces, sucking a breath through his teeth as pain sears up the length of his side. He clenches his jaw, riding it out until the hurt subsides. Once it’s over, he curses. “Kriff.” Johnny bites the inside of his lip. “Sorry, it—” He lets out a slow breath. It shakes, betraying him.

A warm hand covers his side, cupping over the bandage with care. Kun sits up, leaning into Johnny’s space until they’re chest to chest, and cups his jaw with the other hand. He kisses Johnny’s bottom lip, and then the top one; slow, slow, so slow and sweet. Then, so softly that Johnny almost misses it, Kun whispers, “Then I’ll be gentle.”

Johnny almost protests. He doesn’t want gentle. He doesn’t have the patience for gentleness, not now, not when he’s already been waiting for so long. He curses himself for not hiding the pain better, curses his blaster wound for being so kriffing _painful_ , curses the motherkriffing buckethead who shot him in the first place. He even starts to formulate a vague curse for the blaster manufacturer for making the weapon that fired the bullet.

In the end, Kun proves him wrong as he is wont to do. He shows Johnny that gentle is _exactly_ what he wants.

Gentle is Kun’s hands, firm but not rough, spread wide to cover as much surface area as possible as they travel across Johnny’s skin. They leave paths of heat in their wake: heat from Kun’s palms, heat from the blood that circulates beneath them, heat from the ever-growing arousal that grows in the pit of Johnny’s stomach and licks outwards through his extremities like tongues of fire.

Gentle is Kun’s mouth: tongue, lips, teeth. They kiss until Johnny’s dizzy with it. He feels oxygen deprived in the best way when Kun leaves open-mouthed, lingering kisses in a trail down Johnny’s neck and over his shoulder. He shivers all the way out to the tips of his fingers when Kun licks a stripe up the center crease of Johnny’s stomach. Kun’s hair is soft under his hand, between his fingers, and that pretty bottom lip of his looks absolutely sinful pressed against the head of Johnny’s cock.

Gentle is Kun’s voice, murmuring, saying the most lovely things that melt Johnny from the inside out. He never pegged Kun as the talkative type but he certainly has no end of things to tell Johnny. The praises drip from his lips without ceasing, thick and sweet as honey. _Baby,_ he calls him. _You’re so strong. Taste so sweet._ He only stops talking when his mouth is on Johnny’s cock, and even then his voice rings in Johnny’s ears, little moans and vocalisations that raise the hair on the backs of Johnny’s arms. _Perfect for me, so perfect. Look at these hands, Johnny. Love your hands, your arms._ Johnny knows it’s impossible but he can still _feel_ the words land on his skin, taking shape there in loopy handwriting. _Kiss me again, I love the way you kiss me. You’re so good with your hands, I knew you would be. Knew it, I knew it._ For once, Johnny finds himself at a loss for words. Every now and then he manages to remember enough Basic to cobble together a response. _You’re— Gods— Do you feel good?_ Yes, yes, he feels good, Johnny feels so good. How could he not feel good when he’s with Kun? _You’re so lovely, baby. You look impossible right now, like an angel. Prettier than a starfield._ Eventually, even Kun’s words fade away into a repeating refrain of Johnny’s name mixed with curses.

Most of all, gentle is the way Kun slips out of the bed afterwards and returns with a fresh bacta patch. Everything about him is gentle as he sits on the edge of the bed and changes the bandages over Johnny’s wound. The new bacta is blessedly cool on the burn.

And when Johnny goes to touch Kun’s cheek with the intention of drawing him in for a kiss, Kun is still gentle when he catches Johnny’s hand and kisses his knuckles instead.

✩

He waits for Johnny to fall asleep before slipping out of the captain’s cabin.

When Kun returns to the common room, Ten looks up from where he’s sat on the floor tinkering with Louis. “Where’d you go?” he asks, already turning back to his droid. “Wait, wait, let me guess. A Rebel recruitment call for the heroic young captain of this _fine_ vessel.” The Twi’lek puts on a haughty voice, waving his tool in midair like a scepter. “‘In honor of your bravery in the face of adversity—’”

Kun scoffs, stalking over to the galley to pour himself a glass of water. “Shut up, Ten.”

“What, you expect me to believe you were just ‘checking on Doyoung’ for like an hour and a half?” Kun has his back turned to Ten but the tone of his voice brings up an aggravating mental image of the Twi’lek’s shit-eating smirk. “I saw the googly eyes you were making at him after we escaped the ISD. It totally turned you on that he took a bullet for your friend.”

“I was _not_ making googly eyes,” he insists. One hand creeps up to his shirt collar, tugging it self-consciously higher on his shoulders to cover any marks Johnny might have left. “And it was incredibly brave of him to put himself in harm’s way to protect Doyoung.”

Behind him, a tool falls to the ground with a clatter, startling Kun into turning around. Ten gasps in perverse joy, “Oh my gods. You totally boned.” He holds up two fingers on opposite hands and brings the tips together to touch in the middle, eyes wide with glee. “I’ve connected the navpoints.”

“You haven’t connected shit—”

“I’ve connected them!” Ten repeats, jumping to his feet. He clenches both fists and shakes them in excitement. “Seeing him fight evil totally exploited your justice kink!”

Kun hurries over and pushes at Ten’s hands, forcing them back down to the others’ sides. “I _don’t_ have a justice kink. I don’t even know what that is! Stop celebrating, you’re so weird!”

Unfortunately, Kun’s puny human strength can’t hold a candle to Ten’s Twi’lek biology. The latter wrestles his hands free with ease. “It’s not weird to be happy! My two best friends, straight smashing it! That’s cause for celebration!” Face split in an ear-to-ear grin, Ten climbs onto a galley chair and throws his arms wide. “Attention, the whole galaxy!” he hollers. Kun shoots a panicked glance over to the door. It’s closed but there’s only so much six inches of durasteel can do against the power of Ten’s vocal chords. The bastard is _loud_. “My best friends are in love!”

Kun clings to the hem of Ten’s trousers and begs, weak with desperation, “Please stop.”

A cheerful blonde head pokes through the door. “Who’s in love?” asks Chenle.

Before Ten can open his mouth, Kun pinches him hard in the back of the thigh and says, “ _No one_.”

“Oh.” The kid looks disappointed for half a second and then perks up again. “Well, we’re almost there, so you might wanna strap in! Or at least not be standing on any tables.” He disappears only to duck back in and ask, “Have either of you seen the captain?”

“He’s sleeping,” Kun says. _Kriff._ He bites his tongue but it’s too late. Ten practically vibrates next to him.

He has the grace to wait until the door closes behind Chenle to say, “Oh, he’s _sleeping_ , is he?” Ten cackles, delighted. “Dick so good it put the good captain right to sleep, huh?”

Kun buries his head in his hands. Privately, he resolves to make sure Ten is permitted into the Rebellion’s ranks just so Kun can have him court-martialed.

✩

The return to Crait and landing goes smoothly. They scarcely touch down before the med team scurries forward with a stretcher and IV at the ready. Kun oversees their collection of Doyoung with much anxiety and fussing, even going so far as to walk with them all the way to the top of the _One and Only_ ’s exit ramp. He’s in the middle of ordering one of the medics to come back with another stretcher for Johnny when a hand on his shoulder cuts him short.

Johnny smiles down at him and shakes his head a little. There’s an odd note of gentle finality in his voice when he tells the medics, “I don’t need a stretcher.”

The two orderlies troop away down the ramp without sticking around to argue about it, too preoccupied with the wounded general already in their care. Kun barely registers their departure. Johnny has his full attention.

He turns around to face Johnny, frowning. “You…” Kun swallows a few times, fighting the lump rising in his throat. The last thing he wants right now is for his voice to break. “You’re not staying?”

Johnny’s hands go into his pockets but his eyes are a caress of their own, warm and sweet. “Nah,” he says. “I’ve caused you enough trouble.”

“You’re a good pilot, you know. You’re smart and quick.” Kun licks his lips. “We could use a guy like you on our side.”

A soft little laugh huffs out of Johnny’s chest. “You’re forgetting that I,” he replies, reaching out and brushing the hair away from Kun’s eyes with the tip of his middle finger, “am not a nice man.”

“No,” Kun whispers. “But you are a good one.”

The little smile falls from Johnny’s face and weariness, bone-deep, takes its place. He shoves his hands deep into his trouser pockets again and looks away. “I’m sorry, Kun. I can’t.”

Kun closes his eyes. He takes a deep breath, stuffing the rejection down deep in the pit of his chest and compacting it into a heavy ball behind his solar plexus. Only when the feeling has been tightly packed away can he meet Johnny’s gaze again. “Your fee, then.”

“Right.” Johnny nods. “The thirty thousand. Then I’ll be out of your hair.”

“Sixty.”

Johnny’s head quirks to one side. “What?”

“Sixty thousand,” repeats Kun. “I agreed to double your fee in exchange for taking the _Elyxion_ job.”

“Oh, uh,” Johnny bites his bottom lip, worrying it for a second. His eyes dart everywhere around the vicinity—everywhere that isn’t Kun’s face. “Don’t worry about it. Thirty is fine.”

Kun frowns. “But—”

“I insist,” Johnny says, holding up a hand. “You guys need it more than I do.”

And that— that should make Kun angry, probably, but it just makes him sad. “Thank you,” he murmurs. “Johnny. For…” He hesitates and then decides, just this once, to allow himself a little cliche. “For everything.”

The wall of professionalism between them softens. So do Johnny’s eyes. “Anytime, rebel.”

“I’ll have someone bring your money.” Kun doesn’t want to walk away. He doesn’t want to step off the shitty little freighter and he doesn’t want to watch it fly away until it's so far away that he can’t even pick out the light of its thrusters against the pale blue sky. He doesn’t want to go, but there’s nothing left to say. So he turns to leave.

He descends the ramp, fully intending to walk out of the hangar without even a single glance over his shoulder. But then Johnny calls his name one last time and, really, Kun can’t resist looking back.

The smuggler captain stands at the top of his ramp, cutting a roguish figure in the frame of his ship’s entrance. The afternoon sun slanting through the hangar doors paints him absolutely golden. When he smiles, he looks like a damn recruitment poster.

“Good luck out there, rebel,” he calls down the ramp. “Have fun savin’ the galaxy.”

A slow smile crosses Kun’s face. He raises a hand in farewell. “Good luck,” he returns. “And may the Force be with you.”

Johnny grins, sharp and wicked like the first time they met. He turns, swaggering back into the _One and Only_. As he vanishes into the belly of his ship, his voice rings back, “I don’t need the Force!”

✩

Kun doesn’t have time for pining.

Shortly after he reunites with his battalion at Crait, the Battle of Scarif pops off. It triggers a chain of events leading to the Battle of Yavin and the destruction of the Death Star. After the battle of Yavin comes the business of relocating the Alliance base to Hoth while _also_ still performing his prior duties of escorting Alliance supply ships, running recon missions, and leading raids on Imperial outposts. Kun barely gets a moment to take a kriffing shit let alone waste time thinking about some flea-bitten smuggler.

It’s not long after the Alliance has gotten settled at Hoth that Kun gets called out on a special mission. General Organa needs him to fly out to Tatooine to get in touch with a contact there who says he can give the Alliance a supply connection. From what he knew of Tatooine—most of which came from stories told by Antilles and Skywalker—he figured the planet would be, in a word, a shithole. Now that he’s actually _on_ Tatooine…

Well. He thinks Wedge and Luke might’ve been a little bit generous in their description of their homeworld.

He wore civvies so as not to stand out any more than he needed to; flying an X-wing into a spaceport infamous for being the hub of Hutt business draws plenty of attention without adding a neon-orange jumpsuit to the mix. Despite Tatooine’s supposed neutrality, Mos Eisley crawls with bucketheads. This, of course, is not to speak of all the other shady folk that walk the streets. Kun sees four Bounty Hunters’ Guild insignias in the time it takes him to walk from the landing pad to the bar where he’s supposed to meet his contact.

If the streets are bad, the cantina is worse. Humans and aliens alike stand elbow-to-elbow at the bar, jockeying for the bartender’s attention. Others stand in twos and threes around the dark, smoky room, leaning in close to be heard over the live jizz music that rips through the room. It’s grungy, and loud, and it’s definitely not Kun’s usual scene.

“Alright, boy scout,” he mutters to himself under his breath. “Act natural.”

As he walks down the steps into the cantina, he takes his time strolling up to the bar so he can scope out the cantina patrons for any sign of his contact. Kun has no idea what the man—if he even is a man—looks like. Every time he tried to get a description from Ten, the Twi’lek just said, “You’ll know ‘im when you see ‘im,” with one of those mysterious, knowing smiles that Kun hates.

Kun rests both elbows on the bartop so he can discreetly lean forward and get a look at the faces of the folks on either side. No faces jump out at him. The Rodian at the end might look kind of familiar, but… Kun squints, trying to make the alien’s face out through the thick spice smoke that curls in the air.

“Hey,” barks a voice to his left. Kun whips his head around and comes face to face with a grisly-looking Devaronian. Could this be his contact? Kun blinks, trying to place the face. Has he ever even met a Devaronian?

The alien in question bares his yellow, pointed teeth in a sleazy leer. “You lost, little lamb?”

Kun leans in closer, lowering his eyebrows meaningfully. “Are you… who I’m looking for?”

The Devaronian throws his head back and laughs, long and loud. Kun glances around, nervous about drawing attention, but the Devaronian brings him right back when he hooks a red claw low around Kun’s waist. “I can be, sugar,” he purrs into Kun’s ear, hot and reeking of liquor. Kun’s skin crawls as the alien’s hand inches lower suggestively.

Fortunately, the bartender comes over just before Kun blows his cover and his mission by starting a fight. “Here,” he barks, slamming down a glass of whiskey. He jerks his chin down the bar to Kun’s left. “Compliments of the dickhead in the leather.”

The Devaronian scowls, looking down the bar for the dickhead in question. Whatever he sees makes him snatch his hands off of Kun and slink away from the bar, shoulders high around his ears.

Kun frowns down at the whiskey, confused, and then cranes his head in the direction of the bartender’s gesture.

At the other end of the bar, through the smoke and the scoundrels, Johnny Suh meets Kun’s eyes with that _stupid_ cocksure grin of his. The captain of the _One and Only_ lifts his own glass towards Kun in a salute: _Hi, rebel._ In one smooth motion, Johnny throws back the whiskey and sets the empty tumbler upside-down on the bar. He holds Kun’s eyes as he licks the taste of the liquor off his lips. _Miss me?_

Oh, hell. Kun is going to kill Ten for this one.

**Author's Note:**

> a very special thank you to j & j for all their help as beta readers!!!! you both helped me so much ;—; kathleen kennedy if you're reading this, my dms are open
> 
> ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ ♡ ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ
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